From the BBC:

“Yahoo and Microsoft have announced a long-rumoured internet search deal that will help the two companies take on chief rival Google.

Microsoft’s Bing search engine will power the Yahoo website and Yahoo will in turn become the advertising sales team for Microsoft’s online offering.”

Most interesting is the fact that it’s a ten year deal.

Can you remember what you were doing ten years ago? I had a lot more hair and a slower internet connection.

Fact: The balder I become, the faster my internet connection.

Microsoft and Yahoo seal web deal

At this year’s Software Industry Conference, myself and Sharon Housley (NotePage, Inc.) co-presented a session on Marketing in a Recession.

The session went well, yet the feedback we received was fascinating. It turned out that most of the people who attended the talk believed that the worst of the recession was now behind us, and that we had taken our first steps on the road to recovery.

The question is to what extent this was influenced by the people who were attending the session. On one hand you might argue that the people attending such a conference were at the very least coping reasonably well with the recession. On the other hand you might believe that the presentation itself was more likely to attract people whose businesses were struggling.

A quick glance at the BBC website’s Business section shows some encouraging signs, despite the BBC’s permanent state of doom and gloom:

Sharp jump in US new home sales

Deutsche Bank sees profits rise

Updated: First 2009 rise for house prices

So are we now past the worst?

I’d love to share my personal prediction, but with only a 50% chance of being correct, I’ll hold back for now. But as pointed out during my talk, a year ago many were fearing the worst and calculating how long they could survive with no income at all. Today there seems to be more caution, less fear.

From Wikipedia:

“Baidu is the leading Chinese search engine for websites, audio files, and images. Baidu offers 57 search and community services including an online collaboratively-built encyclopedia (Baidu Baike), and a searchable keyword-based discussion forum. In October 2008, Baidu ranked 9th overall in Alexa’s internet rankings. In December 2007 Baidu became the first Chinese company to be included in the NASDAQ-100 index”

Their index of 740 million web pages doesn’t seem to compare with Google’s estimated tens of billions of pages, but they’re clearly not interested in the rest of the world.

Perhaps you clicked on the Baidu link and saw that the only English link on the page was About Baidu? Perhaps you consider this rude – after all how many non-English websites don’t contain a little US/UK flag for us?

Who do they think they are?

With an estimated population of over 1,330,000,000, it might well be that Baidu don’t care about the English speaking web, or, for that matter, the English speaking world.

After all, we’ve been doing the same thing for years.

But with a newly implemented advertising system, now might be a good time to cast your eyes beyond your national borders, and the people in the world who speak the same language as you.

感谢你这个机会

As mentioned in my last post, I got back from this year’s Software Industry Conference four days ago, yet to date, most of my brain still hasn’t made it back with me.

We did, however, post some pictures from this year’s SIC.

SIC 2009 Photos

Yesterday morning I returned from the Software Industry Conference in Boston. My three bags made it back, but a significant amount of my brain has yet to catch up with me. So my apologies if this post sounds as though it’s been written by someone else.

During the conference I delivered four presentations, one of which (an A – Z of Online Marketing) made the point that most US software companies are not actively targeting the world beyond the US borders.

My powerpoint was illustrated with photographs, and managed to avoid using a single bullet point. But I wish I’d spotted this graph from the New Scientist. It’s a little out of date, but the figures speak for themselves.

“By 2012, Asian web surfers, including about 490 million Chinese, will outnumber North Americans by 3 to 1 and Indians will become the second-largest group online.

Tomorrow’s web will probably be dominated by a mixture of the English, Mandarin, Hindi, Portuguese and Russian languages.”

Exploring the exploding internet

On April 10th, 2009, Michael Minkus (one of the SoftwarePromotions AdWords team) posted a blog entry entitled New AdWords Ads Increasingly Getting Stuck in the ‘Under Review’ Black Hole.

“It seems like every new ad I create takes longer and longer to actually begin running.

Depending on the client, and which AdWords GUI format they’re using, the new ads assume the label of  ‘under review’ or ‘Active’, but in either case the ads exist in a state of limbo, unable to accrue impressions or clicks.”

Little has changed since then. Actually, aside from changing ‘under review‘ to ‘pending review‘, nothing has changed at all.

And some of the comments added to Michael’s original post suggest that many other people are experiencing the same frustration.

I have an idea.

If you’re experiencing the frustration of these ad approval delays, please add your comments to this post. Detail your frustration, giving your real name and email address where possible, and if we get enough of a response, we’ll pass the whole thread onto our Google account rep.

Also, if you’re planning on attending this year’s Software Industry Conference in Boston next week, I’m kicking off the conference with the Advanced Google AdWords session at 9:00 on Thursday morning. I hope you can join me there.

When Google AdWords updated their interface, you probably noticed their new conversion tracking metrics: The 1-per-click and many-per-click columns.

I wrote about these new metrics some time ago, but do you know what happens with these values when you use multiple conversion actions? At the time of writing this, Google did not have any information on this topic within their help section. And when I called their support and asked them for information on this topic, I actually received conflicting information from different people, probably because the subject is so new and unknown.

Based on phone calls, emails and analysis of the data across numerous client accounts, here is my explanation of how it all works:

First, let’s take a look at what a conversion action is. If, for example, you sell software, offer a download and want to track how many AdWords clicks resulted in a download, you would need to set up conversion tracking code which you would designate as a download. I wrote a brief explanation of how to do this in our Competitive Edge newsletter.

And if you also wanted to track sales, Google allow you to set up a separate conversion tracking code for each type of conversion, called “Actions”.

Assuming that you now have your two conversion tracking actions set up, let’s look at the data and clarify what we’re seeing.

Within this screenshot, you can see that 200 people downloaded the software, and out of those 200, ten of them downloaded again.

But what about the purchase conversion action? The information here suggests that out of the 200 people who downloaded, 59 went on to purchase.

Keep in mind that the Google cookie is not unique to an action but to an account. This means that once an AdWords visitor hits your first conversion tracking code it will be counted as 1 (1-per-click) and 1 (many-per-click). Each subsequent visit, regardless of the conversion action, will be considered another many-per-click. This means that 200 people downloaded the software, but out of those 200, either one person downloaded ten additional times or ten people downloaded one additional time and so on.

Confusing, right? We did not even begin to talk about the 59 purchases. Were they 59 individual purchases or were they all based on one single person who purchased 59 times? You just don’t know with this data. It’s another classic example of Google giving you a lot of information, but not all of it.

Oh the joys of AdWords.