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IN THE JUNE ISSUE...
GOOGLE GAINS U.S. SEARCH MARKET SHARE FOR NINTH CONSECUTIVE MONTH
comScore Networks Press Release, 05/22/2006
RESTON, Va., May 22, 2006 – comScore Networks today released its monthly qSearch analysis of activity across competitive search engines. In April 2006, Google gained in search market share for the ninth consecutive month and maintained its status as market leader with 43.1 percent of all U.S. searches conducted on its sites. Yahoo! remained in second place with 28.0 percent, while MSN ranked third with 12.9 percent.
• Americans conducted 6.6 billion searches online in April, up 4 percent from last month.
• Google Sites led the pack with 2.9 billion search queries performed, followed by Yahoo Sites (1.9 billion), MSN-Microsoft (858 million), Time-Warner Network (457 million), and Ask Jeeves/Ask Network (384 million).
• MySpace.com has been added to the search engine rankings for April 2006, coming in at 6th place with 43 million search queries performed (0.6 percent share of the U.S. search market). Will this smaller player eventually be able to grab a substantial share of the search market due to the site’s remarkable popularity?
• Google and Yahoo! continued their dominance among toolbar searches, combining for more than 95 percent of the market share in April. Google grabbed 48.0 percent of toolbar searches, while Yahoo! captured 47.6 percent.
qSearch includes Web searches originating from the search engines reported, other Web-based searches such as News and Image searches and channel searches conducted on portal sites (e.g., Finance and Movies). qSearch does not include Yellow Pages or Maps searches.
YAHOO! TO LAUNCH NEW, MORE POWERFUL SEARCH ADVERTISING PLATFORM
Yahoo Press Release, 05/08/2006
Burbank, Calif. May 8, 2006 – Yahoo! Inc. , a leading global Internet company, today announced that it will begin rolling out a completely redesigned search advertising platform in the third quarter of this year to help businesses more easily connect to Yahoo!’s vast audience. In conjunction with the announcement, Yahoo! released the new search ad application program interfaces (APIs) designed to support the new platform. Replacing the original system that created the search advertising industry, Yahoo! new platform will enable marketers to more quickly launch search advertising campaigns across Yahoo! and its distribution network, and help achieve better overall return on their search advertising investment.
The new platform will be deployed on a country-by-country basis, with multiple phases within each market to help ensure a smooth transition for the hundreds of thousands of businesses that advertise with Yahoo! and to allow search engine marketers ample time to build upon Yahoo!’s new APIs. The first phase, building the core data platform and technologies, is near completion. The second phase will begin in the third quarter, when Yahoo! makes its new campaign management application and initial features accessible to advertisers. After the majority of advertisers have become familiar with the new features in a given market, Yahoo! will begin the third phase in that market, implementing a quality-based ranking model.
“We’ve designed our new platform to allow advertisers to reach Yahoo!’s audience through search as well as take advantage of advertising opportunities across all of our unique marketplaces, communications and social media assets,” said Steve Mitgang, Yahoo!’s senior vice president of advertising platforms and products. “Yahoo!’s new technologies and features should encourage more participation in search advertising by making it easier for marketers to understand the performance of their campaigns and experiment more frequently with the medium.”
The new campaign management application was developed based on input from thousands of advertisers worldwide. The initial version will focus on overall ease-of-use in launching and managing campaigns, and providing greater visibility into campaign performance, coupled with more control over how to improve performance The new features and capabilities that will be available in the first version of the application include:
* Intuitive Control Panel
– provides a simplified interface with user-tested navigation, allowing
advertisers to easily understand their performance and providing them
opportunities to modify or enhance campaigns every step of the way
* Enhanced Geographic Targeting – leverages Yahoo!’s WhereonEarth
technology, which draws from 15 years of geo-targeting expertise to enable
Yahoo! to more accurately understand and match to user search intent (“Soho,
NY” versus “Soho, London”) and colloquial terms (“restaurant
near Fenway Park” is in central Boston, MA)
* Fast Ad Activation – provides a streamlined content review process
that allows advertisers to launch most new ad campaigns in less than 30
minutes
* Ad Testing – supports automatic rotation of multiple versions
of ads to determine the most effective, and, over time, displays the highest-performing
ads more frequently
* Visible Quality Index – scores ads based on quality, bid and other
relevance variables, and will be made visible to advertisers to enable
them to gauge and optimize placement when the quality-based ranking model
is implemented
* Share of Clicks Forecasting – displays data regarding the bid
needed to achieve an estimated specific share of expected clicks, helping
advertisers to set and reach traffic and conversion volume goals
* Goal-Based Optimization – enables advertisers to let Yahoo! automatically
help find the least expensive way to meet their business goals-defined
as Cost Per Acquisition or Return on Ad Spend
* Assists – shows advertisers the full value and contribution of
every campaign by allowing them to see how ads drive both immediate and
deferred conversions across multiple campaigns -- not just the last click
that led to a conversion
“While the enhancements to our platform are dramatic and will provide immediate benefits to our advertisers, we ultimately rebuilt our system with the future in mind,” said Mitgang. “Once the first version of the core platform is in place, we will be able to move quickly to build in capabilities that ultimately will provide search advertisers deeper access to Yahoo!’s more than 420 million users, broader advertising capabilities, proven targeting expertise and global distribution network.”
Future versions of the new platform will include additional distribution options and audience targeting based on factors that could include demographic information or online behavior, as well as additional ad formats enhanced with graphics or rich media.
GOOGLE ADSBOT NOW COMING TO ASSESS YOUR LANDING PAGES
Danny Sullivan, Search Engine Watch, 05/26/2006
Google's rolling out a new system where ad landing pages will be automatically spidered by a new AdsBot. The content of landing pages will help determine the quality of an ad campaign. That quality score, along with the amount you are willing to pay, is then used to determine an ad's AdRank, the position where an ad will appear in the results. A high quality score means you can rank higher even if you pay less than others. And not participating in the new spidering system can hurt your AdRank.
What's the deal? Didn't Google already spider landing pages as part of the announcement back in December that landing page content would be assessed? To my understanding from Google, only if the AdSense spider had seen the page for ad content placement purposes or if regular Googlebot had already indexed the page for inclusion in the web search index. If the page wasn't already visible to these or perhaps some other Google spiders, or had been specifically blocked from spidering, then AdWords couldn't assess it.
Sometime in the coming weeks, a new AdsBot crawler will be grabbing all landing pages independently of AdSense, Googlebot or other Google spiders. Can you still block being spidered? Yes. But if you do so, Google AdWords will consider you a "non-participating advertiser" in the review process. As a result, you'll take a ding on your overall AdWords quality score.
From new information about the change:
While you can exclude your site from review, this will provide us with little information about your landing page's quality and relevance. Therefore, if you restrict AdWords from visiting your landing pages, you will experience a drop in Quality Scores for your related keywords. (This will cause higher minimum bid requirements for any landing page for which you've restricted access.)
That page also explains how to block AdsBot from getting your pages, how the visits won't cost you money even though AdsBot is following your ad links and how blocking or allowing AdsBot to your site will have no impact on what Googlebot thinks about it in terms of ranking it for free, organic results.
GOOGLE'S GBUY COULD BE 'REVOLUTIONARY'
Maya Roney, Forbes.com 06/09/2006
RBC Capital Markets maintained an "outperform" rating on Google in light of the impending launch of the company's online payment system, currently known as "GBuy."
Consumers using GBuy, which is set for release on June 28, will be taken off the merchant's site to complete the payment. This will enable Google to capture e-commerce transaction data, driving more precise targeting in future searches.
"If harnessed, the precision of this targeting could be revolutionary," wrote RBC analyst Jordan Rohan in a report Friday.
On its core search results pages, Google will designate each merchant accepting GBuy as a "trusted GBuy merchant." If consumers view this as a mark of safety and security, Rohan believes this should increase click-through rate.
The analyst expects some resistance from merchants who will fear that Google will use the transaction data to charge them more for sponsored links in the future. Google's bid rank algorithm is influenced by click-through rate, and would, therefore, favor GBuy merchants, he said.
GBuy looks to be a direct competitor to PayPal's "off-eBay" initiative, which is still early in its development, Rohan added. During the beta phase, Google will not charge merchants for its payment service. After some period, the analyst believes Google will charge 1.5% to 2%, in-line to slightly below that of PayPal.
"Short term, GBuy is more negative for eBay than it is positive for Google," Rohan said. "Longer-term, it could be a game-changer."