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With Ask Jeeves and MSN eliminating paid inclusion listings from their search results this month, Yahoo is the lone holdout among major search engines to let advertisers pay to have their Web pages in its search results.
Unlike paid placement, advertisers paying for inclusion in a search index are not promised placement. Instead, they are promised that their sites will be included in a search index. The practice has advantages for businesses with constantly changing Web pages that are not indexed as frequently by Web search spiders.
Search leader Google has taken a firm stand against the practice, vowing never to accept payment for inclusion. Its IPO filing makes its stance explicit: "Our search results will be objective and we will not accept payment for inclusion or ranking in them."
Google’s stance has gained converts. Ask Jeeves this month banished its last vestige of paid inclusion, Site Submit, which let Web publishers pay to ensure Ask Jeeves’s Teoma spider scanned their sites. The Emeryville, CA, search engine eliminated its Index Express XML paid inclusion service in March that charged each time a listing was clicked.
MSN followed suit this month when it unveiled a new look to its search pages. A longtime user of paid inclusion pioneer LookSmart, MSN removed all paid inclusion from the search engine, including Site Match listings provided through its use of Yahoo’s Web search technology.
Yahoo remains committed to its 6-month-old Site Match paid inclusion program. When it debuted the program, Yahoo executives explained that it would address the problem of search spiders not reaching all the Web’s content.
As a companion to the paid program, Yahoo operates the Content Acquisition Program, which lets noncommercial sites feed their Web pages through for free. Yahoo has signed National Public Radio, the Library of Congress, The New York Public Library and others for the Content Acquisition Program.
"We are still committed to the Content Acquisition Program," Yahoo spokeswoman Stephanie Ichinose said. "We continue to work with content providers to consider ways to evolve and improve the program."
Nate Elliott, a Jupiter Research analyst, said paid inclusion still has a bright future because search engines simply cannot refresh their indexes quickly enough to offer the best possible search results. Jupiter expects paid inclusion spending to reach at least $200 million next year.
When it dropped Site Match from its listings, MSN did not rule out returning to some form of paid inclusion, including through Yahoo, as long as it is clear to users which listings are paid and the index is improved.
"I wouldn’t be surprised to see MSN back in the [paid] inclusion game," Elliott said. "They clearly don’t have any philosophical problem with it."
Fredrick Marckini, CEO of Arlington, MA, search marketing firm iProspect, said most of his clients use Site Match, benefiting from the guarantee that Yahoo will crawl their sites every 48 hours. Since iProspect estimates up to 70 percent of all clicks occur in the algorithmic search results, Site Match has been useful, he said.
"Without Site Match, you’re never assured that more than 50 percent of the Web site will be included in the index," he said.
Critics contend Site Match gives the appearance that Yahoo favors paid inclusion listings over non-paid, since it charges a fee each time a paid inclusion listing gets clicked. Marckini does not think Yahoo gives Site Match listings favorable placement, but a submitted listing is easier for Yahoo’s search algorithm to consider than a crawled Web page, giving a paid inclusion Web page a de facto boost.
Jim Lanzone, vice president of product management at Ask Jeeves, said the search engine found combining structured content of paid inclusion feeds with unstructured content of Web search like mixing "apples and oranges."
"We found that it affected relevance," he said. "Sometimes that would be positive, but that was an accident. More often than not it was negative."
The Federal Trade Commission two years ago issued guidelines for paid inclusion, recommending that search engines "clearly and conspicuously" disclose that some sites paid to have their Web pages included in the index. Yahoo provides that disclosure under an "about this page" link at the top of its search results page.
Danny Sullivan, the editor of Search Engine Watch, an industry Web site, has criticized Site Match for not disclosing which listings paid to be included in the index.
"I don’t like the way it’s currently offered on Yahoo," he said. "It goes against how Web search is traditionally supposed to operate."
The greatest concern for Yahoo could be Site Match affecting its standing as a search engine. It ranks behind Google in search share, drawing 30 percent to Google’s 36 percent, according to comScore Media Metrix. MSN ranks third with 16 percent of searches.
"The only way this could really hurt them is if consumers dislike Yahoo because it uses [paid] inclusion," Elliott said. "But consumers don’t know it’s happening."
Source: DM News
Atlas DMT released research demonstrating the impact of paid search listings rank on traffic, and how marketers can better model and forecast paid search campaigns.
"What does being number one in search really mean to your business?" asks Young-Bean Song, director of analytics and the Atlas Institute, Atlas DMT. "Just like any other marketing channel, success for search is about balancing cost and volume. Understanding those trade-offs is the focus of this research."
The research conducted by Atlas DMT provides traffic forecasting benchmarks by quantifying the trade-offs between the top 10 ranks in paid search.
The insights will be used to inform strategic decisions for search marketing campaigns and advise tactical executions for specific keywords.
In addition to paid search, the principles of the study also apply to paid inclusion and natural search. To view the complete Atlas Institute Digital Marketing Insight on "How Search Engine Rank Impacts Traffic," go to: http://atlasdmt.com/insights/.
"Paying for the number one ranking may not be the best strategy for all advertisers," commented Song. "For some marketers the cost of traffic associated with the top ranking may be too high.
On the other hand, some marketers are forgoing the top spot, without really knowing how many customers they are losing to their competitors. Most advertisers don't know whether they are paying too much, or needlessly missing out on sales."
The research found that overall, advertisers should expect about a 10 times difference in potential traffic between the top and 10th rankings.
The research further revealed significant differences across the two leading search providers. One major insight included the strength of Google's number one ranking.
The amount of potential traffic drops more than 40 percent between the number one ranking on Google and the search engine's number two ranking. This statistic highlights Google's reward to advertisers willing to pay for the top position.
At Yahoo's Overture, the drop is more gradual, as it delivers to advertisers increased traffic potential for rankings one through four compared to its rival.
Utilizing data from Atlas Search, the industry's first integrated search marketing and online campaign management system, the performance of hundreds of millions of impressions and clicks for tens of thousands of keywords were analyzed.
To learn more about Atlas DMT's search offerings including Atlas Search for agencies and large advertisers, and Atlas OnePoint for small and mid-tier advertisers, go to: http://www.atlasdmt.com.
Source: Atlas DMT
The PPC search industry in Australia will be worth about $70 million in 2004, and will grow to $250 million in 2008, as the demand for pay-per-click advertising grows.
The findings are in the first independent analysis of this burgeoning category of online advertising, to be released today by Frost & Sullivan.
The industry's strength was in its "cost per lead" model, the report says. Advertisers only pay for each click through to their website — as opposed to paying per ad viewed ( one of the reasons for the downfall of online banner advertising) or paying for each sale generated.
The price per click paid by advertisers ranged from 10c to $58, Frost & Sullivan senior analyst Foad Fadaghi said.
Eighty-six per cent of advertisers surveyed said they were satisfied with the return on investment from search marketing.
Search marketing in Australia is dominated by three players: Google, Yahoo! subsidiary Overture and Telstra's online directory business Sensis.
IT Today understands Google has more than half of the market and Sensis between 10 and 15 per cent, although neither company would comment.
Microsoft is expected to shake up the market when it launches its own web-search service later in the year.
Mel Bohse, who manages the Overture's local business, said she believed the Frost & Sullivan projections were "conservative".
Ms Bohse said Overture would introduce a local search service at the end of the year, adding it would benefit "not just those who have a website but also those brick-and-mortar companies who don't have a website at all".
Google has a US localised search beta, while Sensis, publisher of the Whitepages and Yellowpages directory, already has an advantage in this area.
But it's not all clear blue skies for search marketing. The report says traditional companies might be cautious of getting into bidding wars to have their ads placed alongside popular keywords.
Source: Australian IT
Paid search ads have become a major source of search engine income by creating a flexible market for business leads, which allow an advertiser to reach a new customer.
Mesothelioma, an asbestos-related cancer, was the biggest word in search-engine advertising Thursday, with law firms paying $90 or more to place ads.
"It can get to be a bidding war," says Tracy Helser, Web manager for Kazan, McClain, Abrams, Fernandez, Lyons & Farrise, an Oakland, Calif., firm specializing in asbestos cases that advertises on search engines.
Though it can change daily, the amount advertisers will pay for such leads ranges from as much as $100 for mesothelioma information to $20 for conference-call services and 31 cents for paper clips.
From an attorney's point of view, mesothelioma cases, when pursued individually, "are the most valuable cases in the system," says Deborah Hensler, professor of law at Stanford and co-author of several Rand studies on asbestos litigation.
Source: Washington Times
In a move that could hurt the Internet gambling industry, the two powerful web firms on Friday said they will stop running ads for online casinos by the end of April.
The action comes as US authorities threaten to crack down on US companies doing business with online gambling firms located overseas and whose operations are illegal in the US, the Times said.
Yahoo and Google declined to say if they have been subjects of the gambling probe, the Times said.
The prosecutors are arguing that the American companies are "aiding and abetting" offshore Internet casinos, whose operations are illegal in the United States. Prosecutors started a grand jury investigation last year, issuing subpoenas to American broadcasters, publishers and Web sites that run advertisements for the casinos.
Executives from Yahoo, based in Sunnyvale, California, and Google, based in Mountain View, California, declined to say whether they had been subjects of the investigation. The fact that both companies announced the change in policy on Friday appeared to be coincidental.
Jennifer Stephens, a spokeswoman for Overture, a Yahoo subsidiary that sells paid sponsored links for Yahoo, said the policy change was the result of a "lack of clarity" in the legal and regulatory environment.
Overture also provides advertising links to MSN, the Internet access division of Microsoft. Stephens said that it would no longer provide casino advertising to MSN, and MSN confirmed it would, as a result, stop running the advertisements.
Stephens said Yahoo would cease running casino advertisements on its U.S. Web site, but it would continue to run online casino advertising on its Web sites published in dozens of countries where Internet casinos are legal.
Google executives, however, said Friday that they would stop running Internet gambling advertisements in all markets. A spokesman for Google, David Krane, said the policy change was part of an effort to "reflect the growth of our company and ensure we provide the best search experience for our users and advertisers."
A spokeswoman for Lycos, another large search engine, also said Friday that the company had decided in the past few months to stop running gambling advertisements but declined to give details on when the company stopped publishing the ads or why it had made the decision.
Search engine companies, broadcasters and experts who follow the Internet gambling industry said the loss of advertising was not big enough to make a major difference to the profits of U.S. broadcasters and publishers. But some industry experts said the policy change could have a big impact on the online casinos.
"The Department of Justice is being very effective," said Sue Schneider, publisher of Interactive Gaming News, an online newsletter focusing on the online gambling industry. "It's unfortunate. It doesn't leave many outlets" for casinos to reach American customers.
The new policies angered some representatives of the Internet gambling industry who contend the search engine providers were bullied by prosecutors wielding an untested legal theory.
"I urge these search engines and other service providers to stand up for themselves and challenge these pressure tactics by federal prosecutors," said David Carruthers, chief executive of BetonSports.com, an online casino and sports betting site based in Costa Rica. The site took some 33 million bets last year from people in North America, mostly in the United States, the company said.
Although operating an online casino is illegal in the United States, state laws vary as to whether it is illegal for an individual to place a bet. In New York, for example, it is not a crime to place a bet over the Internet, state prosecutors said.
Critics of the grand jury investigation, including several legal experts, said that American companies were within their free speech rights to publish online casino advertisements because they were disseminating information.
A decision by a panel of the World Trade Organization issued on March 24 said that the United States' prohibition on Internet gambling violated the country's free trade obligations.
But companies do not appear eager to test the aiding and abetting theory. Several major media companies - including the radio giants Clear Channel Communications and Infinity Broadcasting and Discovery Networks - have recently stopped taking online gambling advertisements.
Some companies that continue to accept those advertisements, like LookSmart, a San Francisco-based search engine, said they were reviewing their policies. "There's been a general message sent to publishers from various agencies in the government that the legality of this advertising is unclear," said Dakota Sullivan, vice president for marketing at LookSmart. Sullivan declined to say whether LookSmart had received a subpoena.
"There's been a general shift in the atmosphere," he said. "There's a question of whether it's legal, and, beyond that, whether it's right."
The New York Times SAN FRANCISCO Google and Yahoo, two of the most widely used Web search engines, have decided to stop running advertisements for online casinos, a shift that could dampen the growth of Internet gambling.
The move, which the companies said would go into effect by the end of April, comes as U.S. prosecutors are threatening action against American companies that do business with Internet casinos that are based abroad.
The prosecutors are arguing that the American companies are "aiding and abetting" offshore Internet casinos, whose operations are illegal in the United States. Prosecutors started a grand jury investigation last year, issuing subpoenas to American broadcasters, publishers and Web sites that run advertisements for the casinos.
Executives from Yahoo, based in Sunnyvale, California, and Google, based in Mountain View, California, declined to say whether they had been subjects of the investigation. The fact that both companies announced the change in policy on Friday appeared to be coincidental.
Jennifer Stephens, a spokeswoman for Overture, a Yahoo subsidiary that sells paid sponsored links for Yahoo, said the policy change was the result of a "lack of clarity" in the legal and regulatory environment.
Overture also provides advertising links to MSN, the Internet access division of Microsoft. Stephens said that it would no longer provide casino advertising to MSN, and MSN confirmed it would, as a result, stop running the advertisements.
Stephens said Yahoo would cease running casino advertisements on its U.S. Web site, but it would continue to run online casino advertising on its Web sites published in dozens of countries where Internet casinos are legal.
Google executives, however, said Friday that they would stop running Internet gambling advertisements in all markets. A spokesman for Google, David Krane, said the policy change was part of an effort to "reflect the growth of our company and ensure we provide the best search experience for our users and advertisers."
A spokeswoman for Lycos, another large search engine, also said Friday that the company had decided in the past few months to stop running gambling advertisements but declined to give details on when the company stopped publishing the ads or why it had made the decision.
Search engine companies, broadcasters and experts who follow the Internet gambling industry said the loss of advertising was not big enough to make a major difference to the profits of U.S. broadcasters and publishers. But some industry experts said the policy change could have a big impact on the online casinos.
"The Department of Justice is being very effective," said Sue Schneider, publisher of Interactive Gaming News, an online newsletter focusing on the online gambling industry. "It's unfortunate. It doesn't leave many outlets" for casinos to reach American customers.
The new policies angered some representatives of the Internet gambling industry who contend the search engine providers were bullied by prosecutors wielding an untested legal theory.
"I urge these search engines and other service providers to stand up for themselves and challenge these pressure tactics by federal prosecutors," said David Carruthers, chief executive of BetonSports.com, an online casino and sports betting site based in Costa Rica. The site took some 33 million bets last year from people in North America, mostly in the United States, the company said.
Although operating an online casino is illegal in the United States, state laws vary as to whether it is illegal for an individual to place a bet. In New York, for example, it is not a crime to place a bet over the Internet, state prosecutors said.
Critics of the grand jury investigation, including several legal experts, said that American companies were within their free speech rights to publish online casino advertisements because they were disseminating information.
A decision by a panel of the World Trade Organization issued on March 24 said that the United States' prohibition on Internet gambling violated the country's free trade obligations.
But companies do not appear eager to test the aiding and abetting theory. Several major media companies - including the radio giants Clear Channel Communications and Infinity Broadcasting and Discovery Networks - have recently stopped taking online gambling advertisements.
Some companies that continue to accept those advertisements, like LookSmart, a San Francisco-based search engine, said they were reviewing their policies. "There's been a general message sent to publishers from various agencies in the government that the legality of this advertising is unclear," said Dakota Sullivan, vice president for marketing at LookSmart. Sullivan declined to say whether LookSmart had received a subpoena.
"There's been a general shift in the atmosphere," he said. "There's a question of whether it's legal, and, beyond that, whether it's right."
The New York Times SAN FRANCISCO Google and Yahoo, two of the most widely used Web search engines, have decided to stop running advertisements for online casinos, a shift that could dampen the growth of Internet gambling.
The move, which the companies said would go into effect by the end of April, comes as U.S. prosecutors are threatening action against American companies that do business with Internet casinos that are based abroad.
The prosecutors are arguing that the American companies are "aiding and abetting" offshore Internet casinos, whose operations are illegal in the United States. Prosecutors started a grand jury investigation last year, issuing subpoenas to American broadcasters, publishers and Web sites that run advertisements for the casinos.
Executives from Yahoo, based in Sunnyvale, California, and Google, based in Mountain View, California, declined to say whether they had been subjects of the investigation. The fact that both companies announced the change in policy on Friday appeared to be coincidental.
Jennifer Stephens, a spokeswoman for Overture, a Yahoo subsidiary that sells paid sponsored links for Yahoo, said the policy change was the result of a "lack of clarity" in the legal and regulatory environment.
Overture also provides advertising links to MSN, the Internet access division of Microsoft. Stephens said that it would no longer provide casino advertising to MSN, and MSN confirmed it would, as a result, stop running the advertisements.
Stephens said Yahoo would cease running casino advertisements on its U.S. Web site, but it would continue to run online casino advertising on its Web sites published in dozens of countries where Internet casinos are legal.
Google executives, however, said Friday that they would stop running Internet gambling advertisements in all markets. A spokesman for Google, David Krane, said the policy change was part of an effort to "reflect the growth of our company and ensure we provide the best search experience for our users and advertisers."
A spokeswoman for Lycos, another large search engine, also said Friday that the company had decided in the past few months to stop running gambling advertisements but declined to give details on when the company stopped publishing the ads or why it had made the decision.
Search engine companies, broadcasters and experts who follow the Internet gambling industry said the loss of advertising was not big enough to make a major difference to the profits of U.S. broadcasters and publishers. But some industry experts said the policy change could have a big impact on the online casinos.
"The Department of Justice is being very effective," said Sue Schneider, publisher of Interactive Gaming News, an online newsletter focusing on the online gambling industry. "It's unfortunate. It doesn't leave many outlets" for casinos to reach American customers.
The new policies angered some representatives of the Internet gambling industry who contend the search engine providers were bullied by prosecutors wielding an untested legal theory.
Source: International Herald Tribune
Google introduces automatic price adjustments for certain clicks on its Google AdWords Network. At the same time, it plans to place ads for its customers in its own test e-mail service, Gmail.
Such a move could lower costs for some advertisers. Mountain View, California-based Google gets the lion's share of its revenue from its automated advertising services.
One Google program generates ads based on the words Internet users type into its search engine and the other serves up ads based on the words that appear within text on Web sites that participate in Google's content advertising program.
Susan Wojcicki, director of product management for Google, said the move is a response to advertisers who want to price search-based and content-based advertising campaigns differently. She said some content advertisers will immediately see some of their costs fall due to the new pricing.
Advertisers pay Google each time an Internet user clicks on one of their ads. They have called for Google and other providers of key-word advertising services to offer different pricing on clicks from search and content ads.
Because people are usually looking for something when they are searching, many advertisers say that clicks on ads during searches result in more business than clicks from on ads in content sites, where people are more likely to be browsing.
Ads in content sites also tend to be less specifically targeted than search-based ads. For example, Google showed an ad promoting gay and lesbian vacations in Australia near a news story in the online edition of the New York Post about a spat between New York mob boss Peter Gotti and his wife.
Despite continued scepticism about the effectiveness of content ads, Wojcicki said there are a large number of content sites where ads perform better or the same as search ads.
She also noted that not all content ads are equal. "A click from the review may be more valuable than a click from a general page," she said. "Our goal is to ensure positive [return on investment] on all of our clicks regardless of where they come from."
Source: IT Web
Internet search engine Google will sell advertisements on European price comparison site Kelkoo.
Google will provide "contextual" ads to the shopping site (http://www.kelkoo.com), so that small text ads are automatically generated to match the product or service a user is looking for.
Privately held Google, which is planning a highly anticipated initial public offering, according to people familiar with the situation, has its own shopping site, called Froogle (http://www.froogle.com), which is seen as a potential competitor to Kelkoo.
But the deal announced on Wednesday suggests the company is taking it slowly with Froogle in Europe. Froogle currently pulls in price information from sites with the ".com" suffix, which are mostly in the United States.
"The company has nothing to announce with regard to Froogle, which is still a product in beta form in the U.S.," a Google spokeswoman said.
Google has expanded rapidly in Europe by signing advertising deals with publishers and establishing ad sales staff in seven countries.
It has had few qualms in the past about competing with its business partners. Products like Froogle and Google News have shifted Google from a pure search engine toward a one-stop shop for Web content, a niche dominated by its customer Yahoo.
Kelkoo has 27 million monthly European users, making it the third-largest European e-commerce site after Amazon (AMZN.O: Quote, Profile, Research) and eBay (EBAY.O: Quote, Profile, Research) , according to measurement firm Nielsen NetRatings.
Google places ads from 150,000 worldwide advertisers through its AdWords program, ranging from small shops to large corporations.
