Google’s rationale behind the move?  “Protecting user privacy is important to us, and we want to take this opportunity to explain what the Google Analytics team is doing to help you continue measuring your website effectively in light of these changes.”  Yes folks, Google now wants to be the protector of our privacy.  Let us all take a moment and share some internet messaging shorthand responses: LOL, ROFL, BMGWL, DNPMPL and LMFAO…emphasize the F.

Lets be serious, this is no effort to protect the privacy of its users.  If it were, Google would have applied similar rules to its paid search and non-logged in user query data. It would also set the “login cookies” to expire in no less than 30 days rather than leave vulnerable login information available.  Its privacy for a profit.  The goals of Google here are multifaceted:

• Force more Advertisers to play ball and pay for search listings
• Limit the behavioral targeting firms from developing competitive data sets
• Become the centralized controller of all online user data

The ramifications for Advertisers are very serious.  While Google Account logins are sparse today, representing approximately 10%-15% of the online community, Google’s internal focus with it projects +1 and Google+ are aimed at getting users to login and stayed logged in constantly.  These new projects are aimed at getting people socially engaged with limited barriers to entry where consumers are readily agreeable to signup and Google can in turn build a profile on the user which today it is currently lacking.  If Google is able to gain wider user acceptance of these new projects as compared to the massive user acceptance failures they’ve experienced with Google Checkout, Google Chrome and Gmail, their coverage of the user community could easily grow to 50%-60% in 18-24 months.

That’s when it gets scary.  Take a minute and think about how you are going to optimize your website for SEO success when you are missing 50% of the data.

The actions by Google are just another show of arrogance it has consistently displayed to the hand which feeds them.  They don’t need or care to respect the desires of its stakeholders because of its market share dominance.  They  know we have nowhere else to go, so you’ll just have to suck it up.  Just review the comments online from Advertisers and Webmasters, tens of thousands of negative responses.  Even the CEO of NetFlix got more support than this with his Qwikster idea before he capitulated on a bad business decision that outraged his stakeholders.

The reasons behind Google’s actions will obviously play out over the next year.  The best hunch is that this appears to be a clear sign that Google is marking their territory like an aggressive stray cat y limiting competitor data collection.  By not limiting their own data collection or limiting the length of the data collection on dormant user, this isn’t about privacy.  Its about Google knowing more than anyone else about users, which is deeply concerning for both competitors and customers.  Nobody wins in this battle for data supremacy, except for Google, and its stinks of anti-competitiveness.  In the meantime, Google is laughing all the way to the bank.

While it is wishful thinking, it would great to see a revolution on the web akin to what we are seeing with individuals who have been suppressed around the world by domineering leaders with no concerns except for their own well being.  Here’s hoping that a viral wave will catch on where Webmasters and Advertisers alike place script code on their website that identifies traffic from manipulated Referring URLs users and prompts visitors with the following message: “Google Is Tracking You, Click Here To Log Out Of Google”.

The one thing Google doesn’t control is our ability to warn users and advise they sign out.  Here’s hoping for a revolution.

We are closing in on the one year anniversary of the rollout of Google’s Ad Extensions feature to the general advertising public, but there has been little ado about how well the feature set improves your ROI.  The Kool-Aid Drinking Brigade (aka as your Google Account Rep) is selling it their clientele so aggressively you would figure they were getting spiffed a bonus for every upsell.  They tout all these wonderful studies they’ve conducted internally showing improved click rates, but get stumped when you ask them how did it perform on the backend.

So what is a marketer to do?  Should I or shouldn’t I apply Google’s Ad Extensions?

The biggest challenge for every marketer in choosing to apply Google’s Ad Extensions has been dealing with Google’s faux pas in placing the feature on the campaign level of their hierarchy.  To implement Ad Extensions, an advertiser must make significant changes to their campaign, often requiring exponential campaign creation and extrapolation.  The campaign is supposed to just allow marketers to control their budget, manage their targeting and direct how they wanted high-level functionality (network distribution, ad rotation) to work on their campaign.  It was never intended to drive relevancy, but that is the conundrum facing marketers due to Google’s misstep in their technical development.

We recently dug in with our clientele to do the heavy lifting and figure out exactly how effective Google’s Ad Extensions were in delivering ROI.  It was no easy task given the manual work entailed for setup and that Google still doesn’t offer API connections to SEM platforms for Ad Extensions.  The increased clicks that Google touts in selling the feature are a self-fulfilling prophecy because more links means more real estate which means more clicks.  The goal of testing was to determine whether the incremental clicks being received are valuable.

Here are the highlights we found in our testing of Google’s Ad Extensions featurette Sitelinks:

• CTR for the combined Headline/Sitelinks unit increased on average by 60%
• Ratio breakdown of clicks were 94% Headline to 6% on Sitelinks
• Conversion rate to a lead/order for Sitelinks click was 40% higher than the Headline click
• Overall conversion rate declined by 14% for the overall unit

Our hypothesis going into the test was that Sitelinks would create substantial CTR improvements, similar to those in the Google brochures upselling the feature, but that the incremental clicks received would not be of the same quality.  Our tests proved that hypothesis correct, displaying that the incremental traffic being received converted at a rate 37.3%  lower than the control metric.  Additionally, the conversion rate for the Headline actually declined.

This substantially lower conversion rate is pause for concern for advertisers.  To achieve success, this means that the CTR% improvement has to improve your Quality Score high enough to offset that decreased conversion rate, and needs to increase by a blended rate of 14% to maintain similar ROI performance figures.  For most advertisers, this means that Sitelinks are not going to be the right decision for your campaign based on a simple view of just ROI outside of your brand terms.  In our testing, we found situation where sometimes the CPC change was substantial enough, but in other cases it wasn’t.  Hit and miss.

We did find some interesting secondary findings within the test that we were not expecting.  The most significant finding was the impact that Sitelinks simply being enabled had on keywords that prior to the test maintained average positions between 3.5 to 5.0.  As advertisers are aware, Sitelinks are currently only displayed for top-positioned ads, so evaluating performance difference between terms with top-positioned versus side-positioned ads is key.

Our testing found that Sitelinks being enabled had a significant influence on improved Campaign and Ad Group level Quality Score, which helped influence CPC and Average Position for terms in the underlying campaign that weren’t in the top-positioned spots that would allow for Sitelinks to be triggered.  In summary, Google’s algorithm choose to improve average position for historically side positioned ads to a top-positioned status so they could display the Sitelinks that would increase the CTR.  This improved position was achieved often without increasing CPC to achieve that new position.  For marketers, this is coup of grand proportion as it has been well documented the increased ROI and consumer consideration that is provided top-positioned ads.  Our findings showed that gains achieved by getting your ads moved up the board for no additional cost could offset some of the declining ROI for terms that were already in top-positioned spots prior to Ad Extensions application.

Google’s Ad Extensions, and particularly the Sitelinks featurette, appears to have some pros and cons for marketers to consider.  Our research is suggesting that if you are already top positioned, you’ll get incremental volume but there is no guarantee that you’ll get the CPC savings necessary to offset the lower quality clickers that are going to come by for some window shopping.  And if you are expecting lots of clicks on those specific Sitelinks, think again.  But if you look outside the box, there is a potential huge upside if you have many ads riding in the top right positions of 3.5 to 5.0 to get a boost in position without a CPC increase along with exponential clicks.

Long story short, give Google’s Sitelinks a try and make sure that the incremental traffic is what you hoped for.  Placing it on your branded terms appears to be a no-brainer, but after that, results are going to vary depending on your marketing landscape.  At a minimum, its worthy of testing given someone else success.

And when you have a moment, send a complaint to Google to get off their pittypots and place Ad Extensions at the hierachy level they belong.  Ad Extensions need to be integrated at the Ad Group level like Keywords and Ads to gain proper relevancy rather than the foolish decision to place it at the campaign level that has disabled their use with standard reporting and SEM platforms and increased the potential for window shopping due to consistent irrelevancy in cooperation with the keyword search and ad copy served.

Here’s our rundown of this year’s best and worst Super Bowl Ads for integrating the web into their commercial spots:

Winners

GoDaddy - It has become an annual coronation as Bob Parsons has done it again, and in the process this year, to it up to another level. Typically, the GoDaddy.com ads are just crass spots for the purpose of being crass. The kickover to the web is more for crass shock appeal. This year, GoDaddy.com added a comedic angle with Joan Rivers that helped them take the crown. At some point, other Advertisers are going to eventually read the case study on successful web integration that GoDaddy.com re-writes each year. Another standing ovation to Bob Parsons for continually showing us how to create a winning Super Bowl ad and impact your business tremendously each year.

Cars.com – A surprise this year was Cars.com and its two solid 30 seconds spots. With a sprinkle of humor, Cars.com effectively communicated with consumers about the value proposition it offers to it consumers and informs them to find out more about vehicle reviews at Cars.com. The spot becomes even more valuable given the complete bungling by just about every car manufacturer that dropped the ball this evening by not expressing the product specifics around it vehicle models. Great spots, good timing and great web integration.

GroupOn.com - Another big Super Bowl ad winner. The social shopping upstart doubled-down when the timing was right. If you are going to spend $3 million, you want to bring awareness to a high growth industry vertical in order to bring it to maturity. GroupOn did just that with its interesting spot featuring Timothy Hutton playing on goodwill to Himalyan countries with a comedic u-turn that is was a restaurant discount. The spot effectively pushed people to their website and you can be assured they will obtain 1 to 2 million new email addresses captures that they can turn into customers. Only negative is that competitor Living Social one upped them with a better spot that they position just before kickoff where ads cost significantly less for about the same number of eyeballs. Either way, both were big winners this evening.

And as usual, all the movie production house nailed it with their ads. Quick hitting trailers that reached a massive audience and pushed people into the movie websites to view the full trailer and other spots from the movie. The movie productions have mastered the Super Bowl ad push and just seem to get more fluid with their integration and use of the web each year.

The Losers

Auto Manufacturers – When are these companies and their agencies going to read basic research about how consumers shop before the purchase? Depending on the research study you subscribe to, anywhere between 60% to 75% of consumers do research online before they purchase a car. It is that figure why Cars.com plunged $6 million into Super Bowl ads, although they probably banked on those huge Madison Ave agencies to fumble the ball once again this year. The standout loser of the bunch was Volkwagen/Audi, whose agency appeared to forget it was marketing its clients brand rather than its competition, forgot to mention a website URL and then marketed their client’s brand on Google search results while spending ad dollars to help promote YouTube.com. My gosh, was the agency so lazy that they couldn’t create a splash page on the Audi or Volkwagen websites and embed the YouTube video? Triple whammy stupid by an agency that was clearly aiming for a “Betty White Moment” for self-promotion rather than generating sales and customers for its client. Mercedes got $3 million in free advertising…smart move! That’s same agency’s misstep with tge VW Darth Vader was monumental as well, as I learned the Passat has an automatic starter. Where can I find more info on the other features in the care that actually matter to a consumer.

Facebook Integration Missteps – PepsiMax, BudLight, Budweiser, Lipton’s Brisk and Skechers all made feeble attempts to drive fan page sign-ups and interactions as their call to actions. As good as Kim Kardashian derriere looked in that Super Bowl ad spot, you need a little more reward on the backend (no pun intended) to get the consumer engaged. Lipton’s was the big winner, turning in 11,000 new fans, while Skechers scored 4,000 fans. Bud Light, Budweiser and PepsiMax each had generated less than 3,000 fans just hours after the game. While these Brands should be given kudos for their attempt to integrate Social Media, they need to focus on giving the visitors something of value when they get there. We aren’t going to “Like” you if you don’t give us a reason to.

ETrade - It is time to stop resting on the laurels of a winning spot and become a little more creative. The babies were cute for about 15 minutes, but seriously lets flex some creative muscle. We get it, ETrade thinks their system is so easy a baby can do it. The spots simply just don’t do a good job anymore of presenting the ETrade business value proposition. What else do you got, why should I signup? I tried to find those educational videos Enzo watched, but couldn’t find them on the website. How can I confirm if it is that easy if you aren’t giving me any tools except a link to replay the commercial to tease me about these education videos that allowed Enzo to retire!

On the whole, Advertisers are getting smarter and better at taking advantage of integrating the web to their ads. Six years ago, about 50% were getting a URL in their ads, where this year we see 90% had URL inclusion. That’s in itself is a big step forward. The biggest issue is still delivering something of value to the consumer if you ask them to visit you. GoDaddy.com, Cars.com and GroupOn.com delivered on that promise and are the case studies to follow that will reap the greatest return from their $3 million investment.

We are getting closer, but until Madison Avenue absorbs the fact that the web matters, we will continue to fall short of that 100% web integration goal. And even if we do get there, Madison Avenue needs to smell the coffee that flatulating on a Facebook page doesn’t deliver an ROI otherwise web integration with the Super Bowl will continue to fall flat.

The life of the email marketer is a challenging sort compared to their colleagues in display advertising and paid search marketing.  For display advertisers, its mainly about snazzy creative and engagement.  For paid search marketing, its about targeting, relevancy and delivering the user’s expected website experience upon the click.  For the email marketer, they must bridge all of these components together and then beat the goaltender that is mining the email service provider goal to deliverability.

A new wrinkle has begun to emerge in the email space that many have overlooked this past year and into the holiday season.  While email marketers were evaluating their content for spam trigger words, balancing their images to copy ratio and ensuring that they had their opt-out message included, Web 2.0 swept in with a monkey wrench that is redefining email marketing.

Web analytic tools are providing richer data than ever and it is becoming imperative for email marketers to integrate their campaigns for deeper review.  In reviewing our clients’ web analytic accounts, our agency found an amazing growth trend in the use of mobile devices, particularly with email.  Annual % of traffic increases for internal email campaigns ranged from 127% to 508%, with actual percent of traffic from those using a mobile device interacting with email ranging now standing between 4.09% to 15.18% in late 2010.  The use of mobile gets even more interesting when evaluating acquisition email efforts, as we saw % of traffic rates range from 26.2% to 64.3% across different advertisers and vendors.

These trends suggest it is imperative that email marketers begin thinking about Web 2.0 if they have no already done so.  These are monument shifts in a one year period, being driven most predominantly by consumer acceptance of iPhones, iPads and comparative mobile device offerings.  Mobile devices appear to have finally reached the “tipping point” of user acceptance. And with this holiday season, there is no doubt that iPhone and iPads are going to be a hot gift which is going to climb mobile device usage to further heights in 2011.

Long story short, if you are using a landing page or website without mobile compatibility, the trend is clearly stating you are going to be causing your email marketing campaigns harm.  The New Year’s Resolution for email marketing in 2011 is going to be interoperability.

Alas, we had a near flawless integration with our agency clients over the integration testing period, but a few bugs did trickle out that impacted the financials of Advertisers.  The following are a few of the challenges we encountered that may help in shoring up outstanding issues on your end.

Testing Performance Blips

Beginning in the second week of August, we monitored some significant swings in performance data and validated within web logs that Bing had begun to serve ads on Yahoo.com.  Our performance began to shoot up and down as we saw 50% to 100% conversion rate swings for our clients on a week-to-week basis. Interestingly, when things improved positively in Bing, there was correlative drop in our Yahoo campaigns, and vice versa.  Our agency began to manage Bing/Yahoo performance on a shared basis shortly after identifying this.

What we also saw was that competitors of our clients, most using SEM platform technology, began make bid position changes due to these swings, changes which sent their bids lower while we hung tight.  By holding steady and not utilizing bid rules on our Bing / Yahoo campaigns during the integration timeframe, our clients enjoyed an average position boost of one position spot on average while actually paying 10% less for the improved position.

Long story short, if you had automated bid rules set and your position declined, it is probably sensible to push your bids back forward to re-establish your quality score in the higher position and restore your previous positioning.

Limited Details Left Many In The Dark

For whatever reasons, Bing and Yahoo made the decision that less information about the changes would benefits marketers.  As a gambling man, I am sure that wonderful decision was crafted in a lawyers office with a big pile of beans and a metal spittoon.  Communications from both Yahoo and Bing were confusing and those with access to an account manager really struggled to wrap their arms around what was happening.  Wouldn’t it have been exponentially easier to just tell people straight forward the following: “If you already have a Bing account that is optimized, please stop reading here…you are good to go”.  Instead, we got conflicting communications from the organizations.

For those that haven’t geared up their Bing campaign and are still not focused on it, you better get moving as the holidays are upon us.  Your best bet to get it going quickly  is to just translate your Google campaign over and lower you bids a notch…you’ll be good to go.

Complete Visibility Blowout

While this wasn’t widespread, we actually did encounter a major engineering blowout on one campaign that we manage during the week of October 18th.  Coincidentally, this campaign also was seeing the widest weekly conversion swings.  Our impression and click volume plummeted by 92% overnight inexplicably.  Upon digging in, we found that about 75% of the usual suspect competitors were also not showing up in ads just like our client’s campaign.  After running some reports, we determined the Adcenter system was only running our ads between 12am to 6am despite our 24/7 setting.

It took a week to resolve, but once again, this was a major issue if you are managing your campaign utilizing an SEM platform  management tool.  Garbage in means garbage out when the system only looks at quantitative factors.  If your campaign experienced any impression delivery drop-off, run some hourly-view reports and contact your AdCenter representative if you are experiencing problems to get this resolved.

The Dreaded Yahoo Search Arbitrage Network

I noted in my blog post back in August that the most tight lipped portion of the integration was the survival of the Yahoo Search Partner Network.  Nobody at Bing or Yahoo was seeking to divulge.  My hopes had been that Microsoft would live up to the pledge that was made when I attended the Seventh Annual MSN Strategic Account Summit back in May 2006.  During that conference in Redmond, we were promised that the new MSN Adcenter would be focused on quality and would forego network traffic from search arbitragers. It was a subtle, but obviously directed smack at Yahoo at the time.  But dollars and cents rule the day and if Advertisers aren’t swift enough to filter out fraud, clearly Bing’s doesn’t feel its their problem.

When Yahoo/Bing offered those online integration literature and tools, there wasn’t any directed recommendations telling Advertisers to make sure they carried over their excluded search arbitrager websites.  Yahoo offered Advertisers no ability to downloads those lists from their non-functional user interface or even a copy / paste function from the screen.  If you were excluding as many Yahoo Search Partners as we exclude, a freight train likely hit your campaign.  Upon complete kick-over last Tuesday, we found that for one of our campaigns, 85% of the traffic was coming from the Yahoo Search Partners, which defies any form of logic.

Within your Bing interface, the site exclusion module is buried within the Campaign settings sections.  One nice improvement over Yahoo is that you can add more than 500 sites in the Adcenter tool.  The sad situation is that we needed that functionality because there are more than 500 sites to exclude.  Additionally, Bing offers a publisher report that details the Yahoo Search Partner sites sending you traffic. Fortunately Bing has chosen to not protect the arbitraging fraudsters by revealing conversion rates.  Just look for those sites generating poor results, send them packing and your campaign will revert back to successful levels.

Author: Tim Daly

One issue that is consistently present is how product comparison engines that carry Google search ads are able to drive traffic on service offering. Given that these product comparison engines don’t present services in their product comparison results, how do they get the traffic? Organic search is obviously out the door. Paid search is low volume bottom feeding. Where are they getting the traffic?

Interestingly, we are now seeing traffic generation occurring through unsolicited commercial email on a cost-per-action/revenue sharing basis. Take for instance the unsolicited email received that I received below at my Hotmail account. The email below was sent to me was from Short Key Solutions, an affiliate marketer with whom I have no relationship with and given it is my personal email account, no permission was ever granted.

To understand how this works, you simply need to follow the link hops to see what companies are involved. In the example here, we find the following tracking URL: http://bookmeat.info/cubivisbhh4qdsh8. As we follow the hops, we see the traffic trails through Short Key Solutions over to AdKnowledge and then on to its final destination at ValueClick’s Smarter.com.

Redirect 1:

http://bookmeat.info/cubivisbhh4qdsh8

Redirect 2:
http://bit.ly/aBV8Wr

Redirect 3:
http://bit.ly/a9mrPY

Redirect 4:
http://bit.ly/bRPi5m

Redirect 5:
http://bit.ly/90YtGI

We then reach the final destination at Smarter.com that simply presents us with a list of ads from Google. While I believe that traffic received from product comparison engines is typically high quality, this is one of the instances where question marks arise because the ads are not meant to be contextual to the main content…they are the content.

Its important to note that if you follow the hops at different times of the day from the starting point URL, you can see different players involved throughout the day and the week. At different stages of evaluation, we also found AdKnowledge partnered with a company called SearchNext.com. In these situations, we found redirects to final resting spots that included Suggest.com and DoTellAll.com.

Here is some documentation of the traffic behavior:

Suggest.com Link: http://bit.ly/blm0NI

DoTellAll.com Link: http://bit.ly/d3Wkv4 **

Again, note that because these are redirects, the links can change at any time based on those involved changing the redirect destinations in their systems. We’ve detailed screenshots here because the final landing spots continue to change and new end recipients keep appearing. The switch appears to occur at AdKnowledge as they pare out traffic to those seeking traffic to these pages. We can only surmise this is the result of limited budgets and willingness to pay by the end recipients of traffic.

So who are the bad guys? Is it Suggest.com and DoTellAll.com for partnering with SearchNext.com? Is it SearchNext.com or Smarter.com for partnering with AdKnowledge? Is it AdKnowledge for allowing an affiliate to utilize unsolicited email? The answer is none of these companies are to blame because they are all working within guidelines set forth by Google. The company at fault here is Google for not enforcing stricter standards.

Google continues to make half steps forward to unveiling the true demons underlying the non-transparent system, but does so while minding the chinging of the cash register. While Yahoo made the ethical steps to allow specific reporting details down to the partner level in January, Google continues to protect its search partner network by keeping performance details aggregated so that quality performance from the likes of AOL and Ask.com can buffer the bad stuff we aren’t allowed to see.

If you want the Google search network, you got to take it all or nothing. You don’t get to choose the sites within. Also, if you want the Google search network, you can’t separate it from Google proper. You have to set your bids with Google proper included so that the partners get a premium price too. While Google ensures us they charge us accordingly, why should we buy this when they refuse to give transparency?

Its time for Google to finally step to the podium and give use transparency and choice as Advertisers. If we don’t want the search arbitraged flipped traffic from Smarter.com, we should be able to not accept this without havingt to reject AOL and Ask.com traffic as well. If we want to pay a different price for the Smarter.com given their marketing practices in generating traffic, we should be allowed that option as well.

At the end of the day, we still want that Smarter.com traffic, we just don’t want to pay a premium for something that isn’t premium. The balls in your court Google. Its time to show your advertisers you care as much about their financial performance as you do your own.

Author: Tim Daly

The highlights shared on where things stand was quite interesting:

• 25% of natural search results are being powered by Bing
• 3% of paid search results are being powered by Bing

Clearly, both search engine have a lot of work ahead of them to meet deadlines that won’t impact holiday marketing efforts.  As many can recall, due to internal delays at Yahoo in 2006 on “Panama”, the release was pushed back to February 2007 so not to interfere with holiday advertising.  We can definitely be in-store for another “will they or won’t they rollout” 4th quarter.

The most interesting detail that was shared was how search results pages will be shared amongst the two companies.  The companies thankfully learned the lessons of Ask.com’s failures and choose not to go down a Napoleanistic route to meet their Waterloo.   Where Ask.com dropped the ball with their integration was by piecing together results as one and serving the ad that generated them the most money, which most often was served by Google.  So as you increased your bids to gain presence, you paid more to be on their network sites Excite and Iwin, while never getting past Google on Ask.com proper.  We can all now breathe a sigh of relief that Yahoo and MSN were smart enough to just chop up the page.

While getting some news out of the two behemoths was refreshing, we are still waiting idly by to understand how Yahoo’s Partner Network will be handled.  For years, search arbitragers flipping Google ads to Yahoo ads have made millions at the expense of advertisers.  Yahoo finally rolled out this past January, after years of grenade blasts about persistent fraud, transparency reports to allow advertisers to shut down the search arbitrage fraud.  Bing has been a delight to manage to date because of the lack of a partner network that is loaded with fraud.   The big question now is whether the Yahoo Partner Network will finally be put out of it misery.  I’m personally on pins and needles for that one, hopefully Jack Kevorkian will present himself shortly.

While we wait for more updates, paid search advertisers need to start plugging away on their Bing campaigns to get ready for the increase in volume and competition on the somewhat dormant-to-date Bing.  Some key things to start thinking about:

• Bid prices are going to change quickly, so if you are using bid management tools, start to-re-think your automated bid rules set for Bing.
• Match types are going to switch from Standard/Advanced to Broad/Phrase/Exact.   Your Bing campaign may be very loosely matched  as compared to your Google campaign, so you might want to consider pulling back on your Broad matching efforts.
• Dayparting on Yahoo traffic will finally be available through Bing.  If you were lax in bringing your Google dayparting strategy to Bing because volume wasn’t there, it soon will be.
• Negative matching is going to become more influential with the increased volume for Yahoo, so if you’ve been lax there as well, get plugging away.

Finally, monitoring impression volumes and average positions will be key to understanding when the keywords in your campaign have triggered over to Bing.  Once that occurs, get ready to kick in your optimization efforts to deal with the changes, as I have a feeling a transition between these companies will be no early Christmas gift for us paid search marketers.    That makes it all the more important to get some of the busy work I noted above done now.

Author: Tim Daly

The most populous country in Africa, Nigeria has been scarred by military rule as have other nations in the region.  In 1999, the first democratic, albeit potentially flawed, election placed the country back in the hands of the people and the country has begun to flourish.  Today, approximately 28% of all internet users in Africa reside in Nigeria, as close to 1 in 6 Nigerians have access to the internet, with growth shooting off the charts beginning in 2007

What brings me to write about Nigeria is recent online activities of its President Dr. Goodluck Ebele Jonathan. Taking office this past May, following the death of sitting President Umaru Yar’Adua, Goodluck Jonathan pledged to listen to the voice of the people. His chosen form of interaction, a Facebook Fan Page.  And his actions are the playbook every American marketer should be following.

In his first status update, Jonathan writes, “Today, in fulfillment of the promise I made at the 26th convocation of the University of Port Harcourt on Saturday, 15 May 2010, I have created a Facebook fan page to interact with Nigerians. As I said on that day, there is an unchallengeable power of good in the Nigerian nation and her youth and through this medium I want Nigerians to give me the privilege of relating with them without the trappings of office. GEJ”

Nigerians have flocked to Facebook in droves to interact with its president.  In just eight short days, President Goodluck Jonathan has generated 80,000 fans. Lady Gaga better be looking over her shoulder.  Through a stream of great PR efforts, the President got the word out that Facebook was the place to interact with your thoughts and ideas and a community has quickly formed.

But he didn’t stop there.

President Jonathan is managing the page on his own and has actually taken to reading comments directly himself.  So long as the Facebook “newness” doesn’t wear off, this is a tremendous step forward for an underdeveloped African nation to utilize technology in such a way.  For each of his posts, he has generated close to 2,000 likes and 2,000 comments.  President Jonathan is allowing a conversation to happen and he is embracing it, rather than censoring the viewpoints of his people.  He’s allowed the people to define the experience.

His latest updates have responded to comments and wall posts submitted by his citizens.  He utilized feedback from citizens about the World Cup soccer team’s failure to change his position on suspending the team from international play.  He’s taken feedback on ideas on how to improve the stability of the power grids in the country.  He’s listened to and responded to a Nigerian living in California to re-open a consulate in San Francisco to help stimulate international trade.  With his approach, he’s given a sense of distinct value to the fan page for those visiting it.

It is interesting that an underdeveloped country’s leader has applied multiple best practices to implement a successful Facebook fan page while American marketers struggle to utilize the medium properly.  To be successful, the Nigerian President just offered us a playbook to Facebook success:

• Get the word out
• Let the users define the experience
• Create a community that has distinct value to the user

If you deliver on these same principles, you too can get the same type of traction that Nigerian President Goodluck Jonathan drove in just a mere eight days.

The case hinged upon the interpretation of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act.  Google argued that it had safe harbor protection because the videos were uploaded by others.  Viacom contended that Google was aware it was hosting unlawful content and turned  a blind eye.  The judge sided with Google due to their swift response to remove content showed they were actively responding to complaints in accordance with the Digital Millennium Copyright Act.

While Google won the case on a technical interpretation of the law, their hands are filthy with the tens of thousands of copyright violations that occur each day on YouTube.  Ads are run, revenues are collected and the owner of the content has limited recourse.  Most painful for those copyright holders is that their videos are those they get the most play, because you don’t copyright unless the content is valuable for re-airing.

The Viacom suit brings light to a significant problem it must resolve with YouTube.  It is a business built upon the selling of ads and Advertisers do not want their brands associated with violators of basic legal principles that every website follows.  The revenue that could be achieved on YouTube is being stalled by Google lax approach to aggressively cap the violations.

For anyone that has had the opportunity to manage a YouTube channel for a client, you’ve seen first hand how significant a problem copyright violation has become.  It has exploded since the Viacom lawsuit was initiated.  From pirating video off the TV set to posting fake videos that fraud viewers with the promise of content for taking advantage of free offers, YouTube is being overrun by bad behavior.  These users are well aware they are violating the law,  but are unfettered because there are no immediate consequences to their actions.  It is a neverending battle to monitor the misbehavior that simply doesn’t have to be.

The easy fix for Google is to begin administering consequences on the violators.  Aggressively banning users through the implementation of a zero tolerance policy would be a step in the right direction.  The policy can require a waiting period before uploading videos, a 30-day suspension on the first violation and a lifetime expulsion for a subsequent violation.  One option is an intelligent IP Address / Cookie Mapping process across Google properties that attempts to tie fraudulent accounts together.  Then there are flash cookies that most people don’t even know how to delete.  They could attach into Google Toolbar or Google Desktop an identification mechanism that will refuse the loading of not only YouTube, but any Google property.  Or how about creating a blacklist of the outlinks to the fraud sites that tout they are all about copyright infringement?

All of this can be done simply.

There are probably ten more options, but lets not belabor the issue.  We know…and so does Google…that they have a lot of tools at their disposal to curb the copyright violations.  It comes down to whether Google desires to slow down a growing problem or continue to profiteer through ill-gotten advertising revenue.

It will be interesting now that this case is resolved as to whether Google will continue to hide behind the Digital Millennium Copyright Act or show itself to be a good corporate citizens by protecting the copyrights of the very same Advertisers they seek revenue from.

Author: Tim Daly