Brilliant! We can now monitor Search Network adwords stats separately from Google’s stats. Another way to split up our data and analyse it more effectively to squeeze out a few extra drops of ROI. Surely the next stage will be individual Search Partner targeting, where you’ll be able to target AOL or Ask individually and cut out the lesser search engines that are currently draining the budget without giving (m)any conversions back.

So it’s good news and positive implications but lets zoom out a little bit and look at the bigger picture. Why are Google really letting us do this now when we could have had this feature a long time ago?

What’s Google’s Game?

If we can all see how painfully inferior the Search Network is, we’re going to run away from it – or at least the low ROI parts of it (assuming we get to see individual Search Partner data eventually). Why would Google allow us to see the search network in all its inferiority yet provide no tools to optimise it? Well  - perhaps the tools are on their way but, as of the present day, Search Network Optimisation is in its infancy. I believe that Google wants to clean up the Search Network with a view to increasing the Network’s value in the longterm. ‘Hangers-on’ will surely be exposed if Google takes the next step and allows individual Search Partner tracking and this can only be a good thing – both for the client, the client’s customer and Google. The client will be offered new PPC channels to market and Google will surely lap up a bit of the spare marketing budget that will be lying around once a slimmed down Search Network has been established.

Increased Spotlight, Increased Competition, Better Conversion (We Hope)

It’s easy to be cynical here and claim that Google are doing this purely to get clients to reinvest their money more wisely in its own search engine but it can’t be denied the increased competition between Search Partners as they fight for Search Network traffic can only be a good thing for everyone. With competition comes differentiation – perhaps we are seeing the dawn of the niche search engine becoming a key driver of online ROI?

David Bushell
http://www.twitter.com/DavidBushell

The team at 1upSearch have just returned from Ad:Tech, the digital marketing show held in Olympia London. The show seemed bigger than ever this year with many large stands and lots of promotional materials from bottles of beer to Popcorn being handed out left right and centre.

We managed to watch a number of presentations, the main ones being Google University and our friends at Chinwag Live

Chinwag live was a repeat of the event we attended a few months ago on Widgets, but still very interesting. Some great ideas where thrown around. One thing you do realise is that at Chinwag we talk about technologies that are so cutting edge the majority of industry leaders don’t even know about them !

Briefly here’s some of the things we thought were quite interesting..

A New Online Speed-Dating Website

A New Online Network site.

A really cool widget and RSS marketing company.

and of course all the free Pens..

A couple of pics..

Google Presentation

The Chinwag Panel.

Microsoft, Yahoo and Microsoft have all agreed on the Sitemaps .90 Protocol, that lets web site owners and web publishers easily inform search engines about their pages.

“We just wanted to make it easy for the site owners to have one file they could maintain on the site,” says Vanessa Fox, product manager for Webmaster Central at Google.

A Sitemap is simply an XML file that describes a Web site’s file and directory structure. Beyond identifying fresh content for search engines, Sitemaps help save bandwidth for publishers and search engines alike by avoiding unnecessary crawls to identify new or changed files. In our experience adding an XML sitemap to your website rapily increases your chances of being indexed correctly and ranking well on the Search Engines.

Read the Full Article - News by InformationWeek

With the launch of Microsoft’s new Pay-Per-Click service for Live search, 1upSearch is now offering setup and management to customers who wish to take advantage of the relatively slow PPC take-up on this new advertising opportunity. Most searches on the new Live search only show a few sponsored links, giving the advertiser the opportunity to take advantage of a search engine that’s slowly growing in popularity.

According to Nielsen NetRatings MSN, or live search as it’s now known currently takes 9.8% of all searches. A small amount compared to Google & Yahoo but with bidding getting more competitive on the larger two, it may be worth running an account to get a few cheap clicks.

Contact us now if you would like help and assistance with setting up a Microsoft adCenter campaign.

Social Bookmarking is away of organising information on the internet by users. Its a great way to share information you find on the Internet. To get sharing check out Twitter, Facebook and del.icio.us

The del.icio.us web site is a social bookmarking web service for storing, sharing, and discovering bookmarks. The site was founded by Joshua Schachter in 2003, but since it came part of Yahoo! in December 2005 it has gotten a lot bigger. It has been suggested that the site was sold for somewhere between $15-30 million US dollars

It is mouth-watering using del.icio.us and at the same time its is also turning back the clock to the early days of Yahoo. In the early days of the internet, around 1996, Yahoo was an online directory with the editors reviewing sites for free. Yahoo is now a portal with a directory where you can get a listing for free or for a fee.

Why pay people to review site when you can get people to vote for sites? This concept is not new - that’s what the Open Directory does. However the open directory is Web 1.0 slow and run by, and in the nicest possible way, geeks. del.icio.us is Web 2.0 fun, fast(er) and Firefox based

An article on ZDNET into the number of searches confirms that searching is still going strong and the small decline is simply down to seasons.

The most interesting figures in the article relate to the number of searches on the major search engines.

June 2006

Google 2.9 Billion
Yahoo! 1.8 Billion
MSN 818 Million

This confirms that around 95% of searches are carried out either on Google or Yahoo! making them the first port of call in any online marketing strategy.

Original Article..

6.4 bln searches in June 2006 by ZDNet’s ZDNet Research — Americans conducted 6.4 bln searches in June 2006, a 6% decline from May 2006 (6.8 bln searches), but a 29-percent increase over June 2005 (5.0 bln searches), comScore says. The decline in search volume from May is considered to be mainly a seasonal effect [...]

With TV advertising on the decline it appears Google is bringing video Ads to the internet via the Google Adwords Content network.

A guy by the name of Bismarck from the Adwords Video team says :

“In the coming days, we will be adding click-to-play video ads to the line-up of text, Flash and image ad formats currently supported by the Google content network. At launch, video ads will be available to AdWords advertisers in the US, Canada and Japan - but we plan to roll them out to other regions shortly.”
This sounds like great news for advertisers by giving more choice in how they present there message to Internet users. It’s also great to hear that they won’t be intrusive and the viewer will have full control of the video.

Bismark says :

“unlike some intrusive advertising, users will have complete control. When a page loads, only a static image will be visible; the video will not start playing until the user initiates it. He or she will be able to advance the video, pause it, adjust the volume or click through to the advertiser’s site.”

Full Post..

In the office we

While Microsoft looks behind its shoulder wondering what Google will do next, Yahoo! has given the world