Microsoft & Yahoo: Live Together or Die Alone

Our Analysis of the Deal, Potential Impacts

The day has finally arrived.  Microsoft and Yahoo have figured out how to partner together.  And, it was all done under the unparalleled scrutiny of incessant press and blogger coverage.  Congratulations to Steve Ballmer and Carol Bartz.  You get an A+ for persistence.

There are a lot of purists and contrarians criticizing Yahoo for entering into this agreement, most of which presumes a loss of entrepreneurship, innovation and competitive advantage.  However, let’s set the story straight.  Yahoo has been struggling in the search marketplace for quite some time.  They have seen their market share erode and have not shown any signs of turning that around.  Google, through their simple user interface and continuous innovation, has claimed the search marketplace as its own.

What options were left for Yahoo?  Dethroning the market…

New Upgrades Live

Our product and engineering teams are constantly at work processing feedback from our customers to improve our Yield Web Marketing Suite. Our goal is to make your user experience increasingly simple, easy-to-use and, yet, increasingly powerful.

We just published a range of enhancements that we know our users will appreciate and that we anticipate new comers will definitely want to check out. Again, all of these enhancements were driven by feedback from you, which we deeply appreciate hearing. Keep them coming! Here’s just a few highlights:

First, we’ve improved the user interface, adding new colors and graphics to make the interface even more appealing and intuitive. We’ve also added a couple of new widgets to the Dashboard to improve the at-a-glance information available to you, including a new “What’s Yield done for me in the last 24…

How Safe are Your PPC Links?

Anti-Spyware & Anti-Virus Programs “Rate” Your Links

More and more people are using a couple of anti-spyware / anti-virus programs that alert Web searchers whenever a search result link is considered “unsafe.”

By “unsafe” I mean that the link goes to a landing page or website where nefarious activities take place: the searcher’s machine is infected with a virus, Trojan, worm, malware, etc. These programs also alert searchers whenever a website is invading their privacy, the site’s shopping cart is “unreliable” or the company inundates them with spam.

One such program is AVG, the free anti-virus, anti-spyware program. It places a little red, yellow, or green icon next to each search result in order to alert the searcher if it’s safe to click on the link. And, users of Mozilla’s Firefox browser can also add a plug-in called…

Why the Cost-per-Click Metric Can Be the Wrong Metric to Measure

…and an Argument for Measuring CPA

My co-worker, Jenae, recently sent me this email:

“I can’t tell you how many calls I have with folks who are hung up on cost per click (CPC). It’s the main metric they focus on when they start to dig into their campaigns and what they think they want to use Yield Software to optimize. It takes me a couple of discussions and lots of detailed examples to help them understand that while CPC is a tempting metric, having a low CPC doesn’t necessarily translate into a successful campaign — especially if you want conversions or are more ROI-driven.”

Search engine marketing comprises a number of tactics – online and offline – including pay-per-click (PPC) advertising, organic search, branding, and the various methods used to funnel traffic to your Website landing pages.

Too…

Filter Out “Negative” Keywords

Improve Your PPC Campaign Results

One of the most overlooked pay-per-click (PPC) campaign tactics is neglecting to filter out “negative” keywords–that is, those keywords that can bring you loads of traffic that doesn’t convert. Not only does the traffic fail to convert, you’ve paid for each of those clicks.

Let’s say you’re an Internet Security company that specializes in preventing denial of service attacks and computer worms. The keyword “worms” may be an important search phrase for your company. However, it’s also very generic and can also apply to the popular Internet game called Worms and your garden variety earthworm.

Bidding on this keyword may drive up impressions and traffic but you could see little in the way of conversions.

For the “worm” example, negative keywords could include: worms, earthworms, garden worms, red worms, worms 2, worms armageddon, can…

Understanding the Link Economy

…and Why it Matters to You

It can be tough to be a small business these days. Once upon a time, one need only find a tidy shop on a busy street, hang out a shingle, and set about serving the people in your neighborhood.

Then came the internet. And Google. And terms like search engine marketing, search engine optimization, and pay-per-click advertising.  And that shingle? Forget simply hanging the little guy over your door: you now have to do things like “link out”; attract “inbound links”– especially the really juicy kind; and get crawled by search engines. (All of which sounds like a plot to a really odd horror movie.)

In other words, businesses today must be online and are governed, in part, by the concept known as the Link Economy – a term popularized by Jeff Jarvis,…