Search Engine Placement

While MSN regularly trails behind Google and Yahoo when it comes to new features and market share, they have recently implemented a new twist on search engines that might appeal to bored cubicle dwellers and closet masochists. Actress Janina Gavankar plays ‘Ms. Dewey‘, a very attractive but sassy woman that delivers a prerecorded witty remark with each search query.

Go ahead…let’s try “search engine optimization” for instance. Ouch….that was uncalled for! Ms. Dewey may be quite the eye-candy, and amusing as well, but all the search results are just the same as from the traditional MSN/Live interface.

Googles breaking into in game video marketing through the recent purchase of Adscape. As an avid marketer and gamer myself, i’m more confused then a tween on his first date. Should I be happy that there may be a new avenue to reach gamers or upset that I might start seeing ads for work at home scams while im roaming the deserts of tatooine in my land speeder.

Does this mean video games we’ll be cheaper to buy as production companies make extra income from marketing contracts? Only time will tell. But, don’t get mad at me if you start seeing advertisments for search engine placement services the next time you’re playing sim city.

Out with the old in with the Google… er I mean new. Yahoo had released its major overhaul to its pay per click search marketing suite in early 06. By now most Yahoo advertisers have been switched over to the new system. There are certainly some vast improvements but it’s not perfect.

Pro’s

1. Before you could only have one text ad for each key phrase. Now, just like Google Adwords, you can add multiple text ads and test the results.
2. Ad approval is instant for almost all keywords. (Massive layoff of human editors?). They still have catch phrases that require approval.
3. Geo Targeting to the max. Before geo targeting was very limited. Now you can block countries, even whole continents from seeing your ad.

Con’s

1. The interface is bulky and hard to comprehend. Yea graphs are cool but give me some explanation of what it means.
2. Campaign trackign issues. Lots of people have said that users who migrated to the new system lost conversion data or had to replace the trackign scripts on their web site.

Overall, I have to say I like the new sysem. It takes a while to get used to but the new Google like changes have made it more efficient and economical for sure.

Wow is it possible Google might actually lose some money? Viacom has sued Google for one billion dollars for “massive copyright infringement” for YouTube’s video clips, claiming they posted over 160k unauthorized video clips from their cable network.

One billion isn’t much to Google, they paid one billion for YouTube, why not cough up a little more cash? Of course their argument is that they are not to blame. Afterall its the users who are posting the video clips.

What does this mean for those of us in the search engine marketing business? Well nothing, unless they lose. Then we will have one less resource for viral marketing.