Bing is sneaky too

Filed under: SEO & SEM — rasim


In the last post I wrote how google advertises on bing by bidding on the cheap keywords. Today I noticed that bing advertises on google too and according to a few older posts that I found, bing has been doing it for a while.

As you can see in the example image above, bing comes up as #1 result when searching for “search engine” on google. I checked the same keywords on bing and google doesn’t come up in the search results. Pretty interesting, seems that bing actually chooses highly targeted keywords that are not really cheap. I assume that being #1 in the search result for “search engine” costs couple bucks per click. It seems that the two competing companies chose different advertising methods to advertise on each other. I wonder if there is a way to measure the results and actually see who is getting a better deal. It is interesting to see if one google user who clicks on highly targeted ad is worth more to bing than forty bing users (assumptions) who click on less/non targeted ads to google? I would think that google got a better deal here, what about you? My assumptions are based on my cpc campaigns and I tend to like 0.05 cent keywords more than $1-$5 ones, I usually get better ROI this way.

Another interesting observation is that bing comes up as #3 result in organic search, as you can see on the same image above. While it is not #1, it probably still gets a quite few new users to bing. I also think that google has some explanations for this, #1 altavista is the oldest, #2 dogpile is older then bing too, etc… However, when searching for “search engine” on bing, google is not even on page 1. It is in position #14 on page 2 for me here. Hmm… That is odd. While bing may have it’s own algorithms that are somewhat confidential, it makes me wonder how searchenginehistory.com for instance comes before google? Obviously pagerank doesn’t have value here as google is 10 and this site is 5. Backlinks are not the main factor here either, google has waaaay more backlinks. Is it domain age? Doesn’t seem so… It shows 2005 for searchenginehistory and 1998 for google here. Traffic rank/bookmarks/sitemap stats are significantly better for google too. While bing is pretty new, it makes sense to see if there is some bigger factor here. To me it looks like google beats searchenginehistory in every way except that it doesn’t have “searchengine” in the url or the title. There is also no content (it must be the king, right?). Does bing pay that much attention to these?

Anyway, its time to make some sort of conclusion on how we can relate this info to our interest. :)

First, watch the competition and get as much details as possible. When I was writing previous post, I didn’t know that bing is using google for advertisement as well. I thought google was the only smart one. :) While I had some interesting observations, I did not have enough facts.
Second, always go into the details, think why things are the way they are when it doesn’t make sense. As a result of this observation I learned that domain name, content and title have more effect on the position in bing than I thought it had. I will probably do additional research on the subject and see if I can rank higher in bing for some sites. :-P
Third, when you look at the competitor, think that a competitor may be looking back at you. If you have a valuable service, be protective, be smart, be sneaky… As long as it’s all legal… :)

At last, you probably have some interesting assumptions as well. Please post your comments, let us know your opinion on the subject.

Google advertises on Bing

Filed under: SEO & SEM — rasim

I performed a few bing searches for a few cheap keywords today and found a pretty interesting ad. I have a search screen above and in case you want to see the ad text, here it is:

What was interesting to me is that the keywords for this ad were cheap – I assume around .05 since google was not even in the first position for the term. The page actually went to google’s site (http://www.google.com/services/hp/#utm_source=en-ha-na-us-hge-google&utm_medium=ha&utm_campaign=en) with a button to make google a home page. If I were to assume that their conversion rate is under 10%, which is the average on my campaigns, it means that they get a visitor for over $0.50, which is probably worth every penny. Here are a few reasons behind my assumptions:

1) People who click on the ad actually click on sponsored listings. $.05 will pay off the first time user would click on the ad on google since it is the lowest bid on adwords for search network. A converting user may be clicking on sponsored ads throughout the rest of his/her life. :)

2) People who use bing convert better since they are usually less computer savvy and many don’t pay attention to the difference between sponsored and regular links.

3) Seems that bing is gaining some market share, would google be able to slow down the growth with $.05 bid for lower end keywords? Google has a lot of adwords data and it doesn’t take them much to figure out high volume lower paying keywords.

However, there are a few things that I find odd:

1) Google is all for “Positive user experience”, no unrelated landing pages, right? Well, what is this page then – http://www.google.com/services/hp/#utm_source=en-ha-na-us-hge-google&utm_medium=ha&utm_campaign=en? One button? On “Create avatar” keyword? I find it interesting when a company does the same thing it tries to fight, kind of doesn’t make sense to me. I know Microsoft adCenter has some sort of “quality score” system as well. I find no solution to “create avatar” on this landing page. How did google manage to get unrelated traffic to low quality one page site?

2) Google assumes that the user who clicked on the ad did not find what he was looking for on bing and therefore may want to check out google for results. Having some knowledge in affiliate marketing, their landing page seems awful to me. Nothing to compare the results, nothing to say why I should make google my home page, nothing to convince me to switch.

Oh well, it’s google. They can do whatever they want I guess. I can just take it as a lesson. The lesson #1 here is – study your competition, pay close attention to what you can do to decrease competitor’s market share and gain yours! A lot of time I notice that the competition is running adsense. I then can use adwords to run my ads on their sites. I can make unique landing pages to take over customers from 0ther companies, write unique ad text for each of the sources that I find. It is possible to make a bank this way and seems that google just illustrated this perfectly.

As for lesson #2 - work on gaining authority! Then you can do what you feel like doing, even if it contadicts your own policy. :)

Pay attention to the events

Filed under: Affiliate Marketing — rasim

christmasmasMost of the affiliate marketers pay a lot of attention to different events. They know what offers go on Christmas wish list and love to make these people happy by providing a great looking landing page for them. For example, here is a good list of affiliate products with a schedule that shows which ones convert throughout the whole year.

So, what’s an event exactly? I look at it as something that triggers a big chunk of the target audience to do things differently than they normally do. For example, today is the last day of school for most of the kids and students in US. They have no homework, just sit and stare at their myspace/facebook profile all day waiting for your ad to appear. This is a good time to get more traffic and conversions. Just make sure to target the right crowd. It is also almost Christmas, a lot of people do late shopping, some don’t even think about it yet and need to get reminded by your ad.  Your ad probably needs to  show how fast one day shipping is on your cheap overstock products.

Some events are more niche, like March 8 – woman’s day, that gets celebrated by all Russian women while others are more broad, like the global depression that changes the buying habits. Some event are repetitive, such as cold winters where people are more likely to buy a snow blower rather than a bicycle , while others happen once in a lifetime. As I mentioned before, most affiliate marketers pay attention to most of these events. You can still gain some advantage by finding different products and targeting smaller events that everybody else misses or just jump on a big boat with everybody else.

The morale: Pay attention to the events. They have a direct influence on your traffic and conversions.

Blog traffic

Filed under: General Web — rasim

blogtrafficIf you are like me and just starting to blog, one of the easiest way to get traffic is to be active on other blogs that you read. Post comments and provide feedback. All these time my number 1 source was google, but as you can see, it moved from #1 to #7 this morning. It will probably change by the end of the day but blog traffic is still a big part of my visitors. Surprisingly enough, one of my comments got some attention on ppc.bz yesterday, which resulted in a third of all my traffic this morning. I may have received the unexpected response to that comment, but none the less, who cares when it’s my first month blogging. :)

The morale of the the story: Be active on the blogs you read.

Adsense Click Through Rate

Filed under: Online Income — rasim

adsense_ctr

One way to increase your online income is increase the click through ratio on your ads. There are a ton of information on ad placements, best performing ad formats, ad colors, etc.  All this information is relevant and can put a few extra bucks in your pocket, but there is something else that has more effect on CTR. As you can see on the image above (just made a screen shot, but it is pretty much the same day to day), the click through rates are completely different. While most show a small fraction of 1%, another one shows over 9% CTR.

What is the deal you may want to ask? Did I misplace some of the ads? No. As a matter of fact, the image above shows a few channels sorted from the ones making the most to the ones making the least income amount. The first channel shows 0.12% CTR and we tested ad placement forever on that site since we get a ton of traffic on it. This is pretty much the best it can do. Yet, the ad that shows 9.09% CTR is placed on relatively new site and we did not test the colors, formats or ad positions at all. Just through one out there and bam, a little under 10% every day now.

The main reason why you can see such a HUGE difference is because of the niche. We have always been building sites for the webmasters and seo people. Whether it is tools or services, all of these have CTR that is usually lower than 1-2%. After years of experimenting with ad positioning,colors and formats we gave up testing, there is no sense since webmasters are the most ad-blind users. Instead, we decided to give it a try for another niche. We created a website where the most visitors are regular people with no advanced knowledge of the web or how it works. Got some traffic, placed a banner and noticed a huge difference right away. Gave it a couple of weeks to test but the results are still the same.

If you are trying to maximize the income from existing sites by increasing the CTR, try repositioning ads, changing colors and formats. You will be able to gain a few more clicks in the end, but it doesn’t matter much if you are not getting a lot of traffic. If you see a low CTR, you are in the wrong niche for Adsense. Try something different, target regular people with no knowledge on how web works.

I have seen a few more interesting examples of high click through rate. Back when I worked in the custom software company, my coworker showed me his adsense account with almost 20% click through rate. I thought he was really good at ad placement before I took a look at his website. It was one of the ugliest and unstructured websites I have ever seen. I had no idea how to navigate through the site when I saw it and ads were the only things that were catching my attention. I do not recommend doing it however. He was happy, money was good, but he did not focus on loyal users and therefore his the income stayed the same forever. Meanwhile, I was improving one of my sites and went from 1,000 page views a day over 10,000. I started making way more with a lot lower CTR. Focus on positive user experience, keep google happy and build user loyalty.

So, if you have a good site, loyal visitors and good growth, low CTR would work in the long term. However, if you have built a website and get a lot of organic traffic but the visitors simply don’t like your service and never come back, don’t get discouraged. If you traffic is the same month after month, just make the website super ugly. Ads look a lot more attractive on an ugly site. You can also switch to pay per view ads and get paid for every 1000 impressions. Since webmasters don’t want to click on your ads, you can make them look at the ads for a few seconds before they can click “skip” if you want. Usually visitors get irritated with those and you may lose some, but if your service is truly useful and unique, they have nothing to complain about. :)

Back to the main point, I believe that your niche has more to do with CTR than anything else. No matter how appealing your ads are, people like me are ad-blind. Know your visitors and do your own research. As for me, regular internet users who have no knowledge of the web are the best ppc audience for me (preferably 4-17 and 50-90 year old).

Google twitter search traffic

Filed under: SEO & SEM — rasim

twitter_searchYou may have noticed a recent google update. It now shows twitter results as the first result on google for some of the terms. For instance, we own easysubmits, and when searching for “easysubmits” on google, it shows twitter posts before it displays our site result.

So, what’s the big deal? The big deal is it can be an easy way to get traffic to your site. For instance, the term “easysubmits” generates around 20 visitors every day for us. Even if half of the searchers will click on the link mentioned in your twitter post, you would get around 10 visitors. This is just an example, but don’t go for unrelated traffic. Look for something in your niche. Go to twitter and search for something niche specific to see the latest tweets and search for the key terms mentioned in those tweets. Spend half an hour and you may find a gem that may generate a good targeted traffic to your website. Make sure that you have shortened link to your site in the tweet. :)

It was pretty hard to get to #1 position on google before, but not anymore.  Tweet about the brands of your competitors,  industry resources, something interesting yet relevant, add your URLs, get traffic. At least while it is still there, after all, I heard its only a beta.

P.S. I wonder how much more traffic twitter receives due to this change. Please share if you know a good statistical resource.

Php dynamic year

Filed under: Web Development — rasim

dynamicyearIt is pretty easy to insert dynamic year or date in a php page. I don’t understand the developers that hard-code the years, especially on e-commerce websites. I had to redo a few of them. A lot of times it would be a long list of years without even a loop. I’ve seen over 100-line code listing years and it actually take a lot more work to create a list than write a for loop.

These are some of the places where I think years should be dynamic:

1) Dynamic Copyright Year. Do you like updating your copyright in the footer every year? Do you ever forget? Solutions is very simple:

copyright &copy; <?php echo date('Y'); ?>  yoursiteurl.com

2) Date of birth – dynamic year. This will print years of birth from 5 to 100 year old.


//From hundred years ago
$start_year = date('Y')-100;
//To five years ago
$end_year = date('Y')-5;
//loop through the years, low to high.
for ($i=$start_year; $i<=$end_year; $i++) {
//your logic here, for now we'll just echo it out
echo $i."<br/>";
}

3) Credit card expiration, dynamic year. If you don’t do this, you may get a call a few years after finishing up the project. Just kidding, but it sucks to change hard-coded values when customers call and complain that they can’t check out because of the credit card expiration year.

//From current year
$start_year = date('Y');
//To a few years in the future, ten in this case
$end_year = date('Y')+10;
//loop through the years, current to future.
for ($i=$start_year; $i<=$end_year; $i++) {
//your logic here, for now we'll just echo it out
echo $i."<br/>";
}

That’s it. It took me about 5 minutes to write this whole post, including the code. I am pretty sure it takes longer for some developers to copy-paste just the years of birth and even longer to find the place and change it a year later.

Let me know if you need any other dynamic date or year examples. Just thought since it is the end of the year, you may have to change the copyright year in a footer. :)

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