Most businesses follow the Kevin Costner “Field Of Dreams” visionary model for their website:
“If You Build It, They Will Come”.
Annoyingly, this model usually fails. Let’s have a look at how people think about their web marketing and why they end up either ravingly happy or cynical depressives about their efforts. Web Marketing, or Internet […]

I don’t usually cover new Social Networking apps. But, I’m an iPhone addict and I finally came across an easy to use posting tool that might reduce the barrier to use for me, enough to make it something that I might do. Easy to use, but a bit of a pig to install on the […]

Since I did the research for my last description of Google’s GeoTargeting in AdWords, things have changed. Searches that used to yield only nationally targeted adverts are now getting adverts that are targeted to city level. Advertising to mobile phones has been promoted hard by Google - so what happens there?
City and Regional Targeting
In January […]

About three years ago (2005), we started efforts to automatically improve performance of the AdWords Content Network, for advertisers. We were hoping to develop a product, but we were also doing some research to see how things worked and what lessons we could learn. This is intended to be part 1 of a multipart article, […]

I’ve just been pointed to a masterful article about the proposed Microsoft acquisition of Yahoo.
You know, I thought I’d written in below, about how a service company (Yahoo) and a product company (MS) would have integration problems - an issue I’ve seen before in startups where competent managers in one type of operation failed to […]

This article was triggered by a possibly spammy comment, and lead to investigating the quality of the site that was offered in the link. Bizarrely, it leads to further reflections on Google, and the Content Network. I struggle to make the Content Network work for my clients, at a reasonable ROI, and Google itself turns […]

Microsoft and Yahoo will doubtless want to capitalise on their current successes. Yahoo’s increasing Display Ad business is interesting. If they can use stuff like the targeting piloted by Microsoft AdCenter, and improve the control and measurement systems, they can take away Google’s toys…. and advertisers.
In the UK, Google has over 80% of search […]

This article was triggered by unreliable internet connections, especially after upgrading to Apple’s latest Mac OS X release, Leopard. It’s a reflection on Brand, the Pareto Principle, and Perception, which is why it ties, strangely, to Internet Marketing.
There’s an almost certainly apocryphal story that someone was presenting cosmology to a non-scientific audience. At the […]

I frequently hold forth here that Google abuses the real source of its’ wealth - advertisers. The “Do No Evil” mantra is applied to users, but Google does horrible things to advertisers, remorselessly. After years of criticism from Richard Ball and me on the AdWords Help Forum, and joined more recently by other voices, Google […]

Quite a few people have written about using the fairly new Search Query Reports, and the sometimes surprising ways in which Google can extend Broad Match. Here’s another insight into AdWords. Look at the first two clips of screenshots, and notice that the impression volume reported is radically differently on keyword search.
This first screen […]