Quality Score Putting the “M” Back in Search Engine Marketing.

Written by Pablo Palatnik on April 23, 2007

Since the implement of the quality score, almost every search engine marketer has changed their strategy to comply and optimize their campaign to beat the quality score. QSO (Quality Score Optimization) has become just as important as SEO and funny enough, you have to be just as relevant as the organic search but now it really is paying for position, wasn’t really the case before.

There is really two ways to play this game. Either pay more for your click than your competitors (even not being the most relevant but bidding the highest will get you up there) or optimize your campaign and strategize to have your keywords quality score “friendly”.

One major factor to understand: It’s not how relevant YOU think your page is to your keywords, it’s how relevant GOOGLE (or other engines you are marketing) think your landing page is to your selected keywords.

To make this simple to understand, the engines (specially Google) are concerned with one thing (always have), relevancy to the user. ITS ALL ABOUT RELEVANCY. Of course, there are a lot more factors than one thinks to comply with the quality score rules Google has implemented. It’s more than just a good CTR and Bid, but those two together can boost your rankings as good links can boost organic rankings. Although those two are KEY to a successful PPC campaign, other factors do apply.

SES New York had a session called, “Ads In A Quality Score World”. No matter how much you read, you’ll never understand until you launch your campaign and results always vary.

According to Kate Zimmerman, who reported on this session, states, “Though Fox from Google claimed that “quality score is no longer a ‘black box’,” it’s evident that there’s still a lot of apprehension and confusion surrounding it. Many of the panelists’ statements seemed to contradict each other - Google encouraged ad testing, though Stylman pointed to evidence that testing has challenged some of Reprise Media campaigns. Microsoft praised increasing transparency, while Google claimed that their ‘opaque’ algorithm gives rise to industry expertise.”

SEOBook’s Aaron Wall points these factors out which Google looks for:
• if your AdWords ads redirect
• your account history (are you a large reliable spender that has been spending for years? are you new to a saturated market? do you have a spotty past checkered with 20,000 unrelated keyword uploads? do your ads get a strong CTR?)
• history of competitors with similar keyword selections
• if your landing page links to known affiliate hubs
• if your landing page has redirect on outbound links
• if your landing page has many links to other sites or pages that are also advertising on the same or similar keywords
• if your page has duplicate or limited content (or conversely if it has a huge number of links to external sites on it)
• time on site
• rate which people click the back button after landing on your site
• outbound ad CTR on your landing page (especially easy if you are arbitraging AdWords to AdSense)
• conversion rate if you use Google Checkout, Google Analytics, or the AdWords conversion tracker

Google Rising 69%, Yahoo Dropping 11% in Q1.

Written by Pablo Palatnik on April 20, 2007

The beast is becoming more giant while the follower lags behind. It’s no surprise as the search engine giant still maintains a good lead of the search market online, it is growing even more powerful.

The New York Times reported today Google profits are up an astonishing 69% exceeding its expectations meanwhile Yahoo! Has dropped an 11% in Q1.

As an internet marketer, it is disappointing to me as I’d personally like to see Yahoo up. Since the launch of project Panama for yahoo, its interface for pay-per-click has much improved but can’t say it comes close to adwords yet. It is fairly new and improvements are said to be underway.

Google’s purchase of Double Click still has people talking but the giant made another purchase! Google has acquired Marratech, which is a video conferencing company, I guess this goes hand in hand with what is said to be the competitor to Microsoft Powerpoint, Google Presentations.

Myspace News- Another Social Bookmark Success Story?

Written by Pablo Palatnik on April 19, 2007

Honestly, I don’t know what took so long for Myspace to launch this section. This is great for us internet marketers. Another resource to drive traffic to our articles, etc.

[This section was taken from Search Engine Journal:]
“Arrington of TechCrunch has previewed the MySpace News platform and exposes the following:
• MySpace news will pull news items from a number of trusted sources via their RSS feeds.
• The news items will be organized into 25 main categories and 300 sub-categories.
• The order of the news items will be determined by user voting and freshness.
• Users can vote on each item of news with a ranking of 1-5.
• Higher ranked and higher voted items will appear at the top of each category.”

Can this be as successful as Digg, Stumbleupon, Reddit? YES. Actually, if I can predict this right, it will be even bigger. Myspace super exceeds all these social bookmarks in traffic and users. One problem..myspacers are there for one reason, to network with their friends, check out profiles, etc.

Myspace should implement the news section in their homepage and in each members profile, if that is possible (I don’t know if that’s how it will work or not), than the potential for their new News section can compete with Digg and become a bigger source.

This is something to look forward in the weeks to come.

The BuZzZz…Word On the Street 4.18.07

Written by Pablo Palatnik on April 19, 2007

StumbleUpon Aquired By eBay? Wow. I have to day, savy move by the online auction giant..riding with the wave, and why not? StumbleUpon can compete and is competing in the social media market. The purchase is said to be around 40-45 Million dollars.

Froogle Turning Into Google Product Search. It’s a bit shocking that when I mention Froogle to people, they don’t really know what it is. I started to list some of my products for my skateboarding website about 5 months ago and I have to say it did get decent traffic from that source. In an effort to better promote Froogle, Google is now calling it Google Product Search and should be in the Search Engine live soon.

Yahoo! Analytics. Yahoo Can’t stand back and let Google Analytics be everyone’s analytics tool. The Search Engine giant uses Keylime as its analytics platform but said to deliver information to the marketer that they understand and need. This analytics platform will not be free of charge, fee’s not disclosed yet.