CogBlog

Utah Business magazine recently listed Michelle and I among the 40 rising stars under 40 in Utah. Of course, I think we both counted for one spot so... maybe I'm 41?

Seriously though, it was a very nice complement to be included in the issue. I think we have our work cut out for us based on the accomplishments of others on the list.

Here is the article on Utah Business

I've just about waded through the 600+ email waiting for me here on my return.

AdTech San Francisco was a great event. I understand that it set a new attendance record, and I believe it. The exhibit hall was overflowing into surrounding rooms and hallways. Registration was moved upstairs (to a space actually smaller than last year) to make more room.

You can view my postings from the trip here, and view the entire coverage at the official AdTech Blog.

For the next several days I'll be here in San Francisco attending Ad:Tech. Ad:Tech is the largest and oldest ineractive advertising conference in the US. This year, I'll be blogging the event with a team from MarketingVox. The event starts in a little over 8 hours with the Google sponsored breakfast. Follow the event through the official Ad:Tech Blog site.

Just finished a Google Local Search AdWords webinar, and there are some really amazing features.

Google allows you to deliver keyword targeted ads to DMA's all across the US and Canada. But, the geo-targeting doesn't stop there. You can specify areas by:

1) Pinpointing a location and selecting a radius within which to deliver ads. So, choose the center of town and deliver to everyone within ten miles if you like.

2) By specifying at least three particular points you can create a target area just for your ad delivery. This one just blows me away. For instance, say you want to deliver your message just to individuals within a 10 square block area of lower Manhattan. Just define the four corners by address, Google will convert them into longitude and latitude points, and your off and running.

Of course, there are some issues with GeoTargetting. Google relies on their distribution partners to provide them good information as to the location of particular IP addresses. So far, they only have about 5 partners on board, and this does not include AOL. But, they say they are actively working with them, but can't say exactly when they will come on board.

Occasionally, Google will deliver local ads based on the content of the user query. For instance, the query "San Francisco Restaurants" may be served local targeted ads. The only question not fully answered during the webinar had to do with this feature. If a person searches for a common location, how does Google determine which local specific ads to display. They said they would rely on their global query history to deliver the most likely option. Sounds like that hasn't fully been thought through, or was at least not fully explained.

Local ads must compete with national bids for the same phrases. But, theoretically, a targeted local specific message would see a higher click-through rate and would thus require a lower bid to rank highly. This has to do with Google's auction + relevance style ad ranking system.

So, if you're wondering how Google could justify a potential $35 billion market cap in it's upcoming IPO, try imagining millions of the world's plumbers, doctors, mechanics, restaurants and other local specific services using Google to generate new business.

Earlier this week, Bambi Francisco at CBS MarketWatch commented on Business.com (link required registration). The article describes some long lost .com names that are trying to revive themselves with paid search.

She credits Business.com for outlasting earlier rivals who cratered during the bust. But, feels that "the chance that one niche company like Business.com can stand alone is highly unlikely".

I have to disagree on this one. We've been Business.com customers for about 3 years now, and I'm impressed with the growth of their directory. Here are some things I think they have going for them:

1) The quality of the traffic they deliver to advertisers is excellent. In terms of total cost per conversion they have frequently been the most cost effective PPC source for B2B customers. The conversion rate has dropped lately, in part because they have more distribution partners whose traffic is not quite as good as those who go to Business.com directly. This is something to keep an eye on, but they are certainly not alone when it comes to affiliate quality issues.

2) More than any other niche portal Business.com is applying the rules of Search Engine Optimization (SEO) to their large directory. And, it is paying off. For example, search Google for "time and attendance" and you'll find the Business.com as number five. This is a phrase that has frequently reached $15/click on Overture, so a high position in natural rankings is extremely valuable. Large niche portals are able to compete for these top places because they have large volumes of highly targeted content.

A couple things to notice when you look at the Business.com Time & Attendance page: That small bit of descriptive text at the top of the page serves boost the prominence of the key phrase by including it as the very first bit of text. If you were to look at the page code, that sentence would reside very high up, right after the Body tag. This is one thing search engines like Google look for when ranking pages. Also, the page is titled perfectly, short sentence with the key phrase at the beginning. The phrase is included in the URL, and the URL does not contain a query string. The phrase is again repeated in an H1 header tag (the orange title).

So, obviously someone is making some specific adjustments to the Business.com pages to encourage natural search traffic from the other search portals. You would be surprised how often this is not the case -- almost always.

I expect to see more of Business.com in the future. They may be snapped up by a Yahoo, or Google eventually, but if I were at Business.com I'd be pretty selective about any offers. There is plenty of room for a niche player that knows what they are doing. I think Business.com has a bright future.

Here is something I've been thinking about lately.

When placing online media, graphic ads (banners) or text links, many agencies place a small bit of tracking information in the query string (?the bit after the question mark) of the linked URL. This is often referred to as a "tracking URL".

Link popularity is one measurement of the importance of a website by looking at the number and importance of the sites linking to it. Google incorporates link popularity into their much-discussed Page Rank number. You can get some idea of your link popularity by checking the number and types of sites linking to you, as compared to your competitors.

Here is an interesting test:
According to Google how many pages link to Google.com?
328,000 pages today.
How many link to Yahoo!?
496,000 pages.

So is Yahoo more important than Google? Maybe, although many of those 496,000 pages are probably pages within the Yahoo domain.

But, back to the original issue. What I'm wondering is whether a large campaign loses some of the link popularity benefit via tracking URLs. Instead of spreading thousands of links directly to your landing page, you are spreading thousands of links to thousands of unique URLs on your domain. By altering the query string, you are effectively identifying a new page. We've seen that sponsored listings ultimately make it into search indices, complete with tracking information. We still see visitors come from Yahoo campaigns that have ended over a year ago. But, those links were spidered and incorporated into search indices, where they may live forever.

Recently we noticed click-throughs for one client on a small PPC provider began climbing through the roof. All the clicks were for a particularly competitive phrase. Where in the previous month we had seen only several dozen visits from this provider. In April, we saw several hundred.

At the same time, our client began receiving calls from some irate customers. They claimed that our client was hijacking their computers and forcing their start page to contain a link to our client's website.

Turns out that the PPC provider had a bad affiliate who was inserting the the top five listings for a number of terms into a nasty spyware application. The entire purpose of the application was to force deliver PPC listings.

We ultimately resolved the issue with the help of the search provider. But, it makes me wonder if this will ultimately diminish the value of the smaller players who tend to rely on the smaller affiliates?

Wow. This is interesting news.

Google will begin serving graphic media through it's AdWords program. The ads will not appear on Google.com but will instead be served on AdSense partner sites. If you are not familiar, AdSense allows publishers to display AdWords on the pages of their site in exchange for a revenue share of click-throughs generated. The ads are automatically targeted to the content of the page by Google.

Here is what Google says about media sizes:
You have four size and placement options: Banner (468 x 60), Leaderboard (728 x 90), Inline Rectangle (300 x 250), and Skyscraper (120 x 600). We may resize your images in some cases.

All four are IAB (Interactive Advertising Bureau) standards. Two of the four are in IAB's Universal Ad Package of four sizes they hope will become standard supported units for all publishers. Left out are the Wide Skyscraper (160x600), and the Standard Rectangle (180x150).

No rich media, and no animation. GIF, JPEG, and PNG formats only. Seems kind of limiting but I'm sure it is subject to change.

They have already integrated the new options into the "create new ad" option of the AdWords management interface. You can bet I'll have some ads running tomorrow for several clients. It will be very interesting to see what kind of distribution is available, and what sort of conversion rates we see from the new format.

http://www.aquada.co.uk/

I can see myself in this. Now I just need to come up with the $250k...