Fuck MSN. No, Really.

After trying repeatedly all day (though the PPC Ninja said I should just forget about getting it today), MSN still has not been able to pull up my search activity for yesterday. And now, I go to re-do the report, and I get this special treat...


Fuck MSN.

Utah Says, "My Bad"

Search Engine Land reported today that the state senate in Utah wishes they could call a mulligan on the recent passing of a law that would prohibit bidding on a competitor's brand terms.

I'd comment on this myself, but I don't think I can muster the caliber of snarkiness necessary. Besides, SEL's response of "Yeah, you think?" seemed to sum it up nicely.

MSN AdCenter... Still A Piece Of Shite.

When I began using the new beta version of AdCenter a few weeks ago, I had high hopes.

Boy was I fucking stupid.

I came in this morning to put together a weekly analysis of how I am doing in all the engines I run in... And even though I generated my report for MSN over 20 minutes ago, it STILL has not populated into my queue.

After about 10 minutes, I decided to take a picture of the time.

Then I took it again.

And one last time, just for shitz and giggles.

Still no report. This is all I have...

Working with MSN has moved past "absurdly funny." Now I think it qualifies as "certifiably insane."

It's like I'm in a relationship with someone, and they aren't even there. They don't write. They don't call, let alone take me out.

They probably tell people I'm a crazed psycho-path who only thinks she has a relationship with them... But really doesn't.

MSN... I'm gonna stop putting out soon. Then you'll be sorry.

AOL Going To India.

Reading online just now... AOL is launching a portal in India.

It's about time they did this. They've outsourced all their customer service jobs to there. Now it can bring its actual "service" to the masses there.

I am digging their "Gurus" channel on it. (Because I am a huge yoga fan.) And it's interesting to see that they have separated out their "cricket" channel from their "sports" channel. (Isn't cricket a sport?) And who doesn't love Bollywood films?

I think I may like this version of the AOL portal better than the US version. (And I used to do AOL's SEO and some of their PPC. So I know their content.)

"Glimpse"-ing Into The Future Of Online Shopping.

Vertical search engines are extremely useful. And there are plenty of them out there, depending on what it is you're looking for...

Well more often than not, a lot of times when I am online, I am looking for clothing or home decor stuff. (I'm a married chick. Two incomes, with no kids... I like to shop.) Problem is though, I seem to be frequenting the same sites over and over again when I shop for clothes (Anthropologie, Bergdorf, Neiman Marcus) and decor (Crate and Barrel, West Elm, Bed Bath and Beyond, Target).

I've tried branching out to Google to help me with my searches... But it doesn't really go that well most times. The organic results are extremely broad in these categories, and the paid results are often too "trashy" and don't inspire me to click. So most times, I rely on magazines and online editorial to alert me of new sites I should be checking out for my shopping.

And one of those sites I rely on (the NY Times Styles Section) had an article today on a site I had never heard before called Glimspe.com. Glimpse is an online shopping engine. It pulls data in from various sites and feeds them in search queries.

Searching for "paige denim jeans" brought back 156 results. Some were from sites I had been to in the past, and some were new sites.

Google brought back 717,000 results.


And while the first few in both the paid and organic listings were useful... There were too many results. Glimpse.com brought back only relevant choices. And it allows me to tag items into lists.

Bottom line: Vertical search is a wonderful thing.

As more and more verticals start to have an abundance of search engines that make it easy for Internet users to navigate and find what they're looking for, I think engines (like Google) will have to rethink somewhat how they present data.

Who wants to surf through pages and pages of different sites to find what they are looking for? When I know I want jeans (and I don't feel like hitting up my local jean store), I want to be able to find what I want easily.

I don't have time to "eff" around when it comes to getting my "clothing search" on.

Google vs. God.

I guess we should expect Google to extend their interest and reach on all things "God."

We always used to joke (at my last agency) that Google wanted to be every one's source for "everything." I guess we're gonna see them take God on next.

Medium Mediums in the Media(s)

One thing in this industry that has always rubbed me the wrong way, is the inexcusably large number of executives that do not know the proper use of the word medium. I can't tell you how many times I have listened to a Director, VP or CEO use the word improperly when addressing the entire company or even a client. Nothing says, "I really have no fucking idea what I'm talking about" like referring to marketing distribution channels as "mediums".

To clarify: "MEDIUMS" IS NOT A FUCKING WORD. Unless, of course, you're referring to a group of people that can communicate with the dead. Is that what you were talking about? We should explore new groups of people that communicate with the dead? No? No, I didn't think so.

If you are making a sorry-ass attempt at using the plural form of medium, the correct word is media. I'll repeat that, the plural of medium is media. If you can't use the word correctly, you have no place pretending that you are speaking from a position of authority on the subject. The very name of the thing about which you are speaking should probably be close to the top of the list of things to avoid getting completely wrong. Unless you're on a stage wearing rainbow suspenders and a spinning bow-tie.

And God help you if you should say "medias" in my presence. Seriously, I will ruin your day.

Stephen Colbert Wants "Balls."

Reading through some blogs this morning, I came across this posting about Stephen Colbert (from The Colbert Report) asking people to "Google Bomb" his site so that he could show up in position one in Google on the term, "Giant Brass Balls."

Let's see if we can all help the man out with this... Come on now! Add a link to your site/blog today!

I love Stephen Colbert's Giant Brass Balls!!!!

Search Director Job At Media Contacts.

Just received a note in my email from a recruiter working for Media Contacts here in Boston. They're looking for a Search Director there. Here's the email...

We are looking for a Search Director to join Media Contacts in Boston to oversee our Boston accounts as well as a few regional office accounts. There are 8 people in the group (and we are expanding) working on clients such as Vonage, Fidelity, Royal Caribbean, Dannon, BGI, Graco Baby, etc.

If anyone wants the contact info for the recruiter, let me know and I'll send it to you.

Paid Search... It's Sexier.

I had probably two or three different people in my office email me the Shari Thurow ClickZ article on how the search world needs more "vaginas" working in it.

There was once a time where I felt kinda left out from the hierarchy of the search world because I didn't have a penis. (This was circa 2004 to 2005.) Then I switched agencies and found a work environment where it was mostly women in charge. (And it was a nice change.)

I do agree that there need to be more women doing organic search. I think the paid side tends to be a "sexier" form of marketing, and attracts more females, than the organic side. I believe this is because in the early days of SEO, as Shari says, "(it) had little to do with marketing and a lot to do with Web site development's (even) geekier aspects."

In fact, if SEO and PPC were divided into the two personalities of Superman/Clark Kent... SEO would be "Clark Kent" and PPC would be "Superman."

I mean... Sure, Superman is an attractive guy. (I mean, how can he NOT be with the muscles, hair, those killer eyes?...) But when it comes down to it, Clark Kent is the geeky side of the the whole package. He's down to Earth (because he doesn't fly, Superman does... Duh!) and is the everyday persona.

But (most) chicks don't want the everyday guy. (Well, I do. But I am in the minority.) They want the "stud." He's sexier. And if they get to be seen with him, they themselves are considered "hot." It's a status thing.

And it's the same with search. More ladies have flocked to the client-facing and PPC side because it's sexier. You get money to spend. Vendors buy you free drinks and send you crap with their logo plastered all over it. (Then they avoid your calls when something goes wrong with your campaign...)

SEO is the geeky and non-sexy side. And it's gonna be harder to attract more ladies to it until it becomes sexier. Or until IT guys start to look more like "Superman."

MSN AdCenter Beta... Actually Not Crappy.

I feel like I may have to take back that headline... Because in my experience with MSN's AdCenter, something usually goes crappy.

I've been doing paid search for about a year now. And in that short time, I learned very quickly (early on) what an unpleasant experience it was working with MSN AdCenter. My woes included:

• Inaccurate reporting. Numbers for one specific day would change if you checked them a few days later because the system hadn't input all the data when you initially checked it.
• A "bi-atch" of a bulksheet upload template. What was up with the multiple tabs? It was confusing. And to be honest, I don't even think my anxiety-ridden bitch of a rep knew how to fill it out completely. She managed to upload campaigns incorrectly after chastising me for filling it out incorrectly.
• Rejections on keywords that included your brand name. The process to get these reviewed was time consuming and a vortex in which a request goes in... But the status never comes out.
• Slow functionality in reporting. The system just moved too slow. It would take me about 15 minutes to pull data for the previous day.

Then, last week, I came across an industry article that listed the Beta link for the new version of AdCenter. And to be honest, I purposely set my expectations for it extremely low. I mean, I was convinced it was a "crap" product. And the volume they offer seems to be very low. (I can get 400% more traffic daily from Ask.com.)

But to my surprise, after having used the Beta version since last week, I am optimistic for MSN.

Now, I'm not a rocket scientist... So I'm not doing anything "super cool" with MSN. I have campaigns running. I try in vain to optimize them. (Hasn't worked really well.) And I pull, daily, my clicks and spend to compare against the conversion data being reported in-house here at work.

But despite having such simple needs from MSN, in the past they had always disappointed me. But with the new version of AdCenter, everything seems to be functioning well. Very well. Almost too well. So well, I feel like it would be foolish to believe it will last.

Accentuating the positive:

• My reports run quickly.
• It appears to be insanely easy to bulk upload keywords using the spreadsheet they provide.
• Data seems to be accurate day to day.

And for now, that's enough for me. If these things continue, I may stop referring to my rep as the "evil witch who doesn't respond to emails."

If these things continue to function well by themselves, I may not even need my rep. And then, MSN could stop having their outsourced recruiters contact me about "an exciting job opportunity for Microsoft."

Google Loves.........Everyone!

It might have been lost in all of the fun that is Friday the 13th, but looks like Google is on the M&A path again - this time scooping up DoubleClick. I'm actually a bit surprised it took them this long to make a significant move into the bid management space, but let's take a look at the deal:

• $3.1B in cash - yes, cash.
• DoubleClick is one of the leaders for display and search marketing bid management technology
• Plugs Google into Agencies that much more
• Allows Google to better optimize their own display network which really hasn't been performing that well (at least from personal experience)

The real question I have here is whether or not Google Analytics will somehow get plugged into this as well which would allow Google to offer a complete end to end solution for advertisers. Whether you were running display or search - they would then have all of the tools you would need to become successful. Plus when you look at all the new features they continue to roll out for managing search campaigns - it is only a matter of time before a robust integrated solution is launched as well.

Good for Google I say.....and good for DoubleClick - now don't go spending your billions all at once kids!

--Da Search Zombie.

Sitemaps... Now The Standard.

A friend of mine who works in-house doing search for a company has been having a bit of an issue.

This friend has been trying to get the controlling website powers at her company to implement the Yahoo! and Google Sitemaps she had created. They are hesitant to do so because they feel, "It would be a waste of resources. We are already very crawler-friendly."

It's been a battle for some months. But now there is a bright light on the horizon for my friend.

Yesterday, Kevin Newcomb wrote an article about the four big engines (Google, Yahoo!, MSN and even Ask.com) coming together to establish auto-discovery protocols when it comes to Sitemaps files.

In the article was a "snippet" that my friend sent off to the "powers that be" at her company that helps build the case for why they need to implement sitemaps files...

"From a search engine's perspective, it's a more efficient way to know when a page has been updated than recrawling an index... None of the engines plan to stop crawling the Web to index sites, but will use the sitemaps protocol to do so more efficiently."

Bottom line... It's more efficient to set-up these files and have them available. They're becoming the standard for websites who want to be major players online in their space.

Engines make these types of tools to help webmasters and search marketers. Why wouldn't you want to have one?

March SE Market Share.

Not all search engine rankings are equal people!

I was reading a piece from MediaPost this morning about Microsoft discussing their "search strategy." (Wait? You can use MSN to find stuff online?)

Anyway... Included in the piece was the latest search engine market share (from March 2007) from Hitwise.



This is why I continue to focus on optimizing for Google when it comes to SEO. Each of the top three engines have their own "quality guidelines." But I really don't care a crap about MSN's. And I kinda don't care about Yahoo!'s either. (Yahoo!'s guidelines are vague and LOADED with double standards.)

My belief, when it comes to SEO, is that if you optimize with a core focus on Google, you're going to be fine. Visibility in the other engines will fall into place. (And if they don't... Well, this market share snapshot leads me to ask "Who gives a crap about the other engines right now?")

I mean, think about it... What's more valuable? A position one ranking in MSN on the term "search marketing" or a position one ranking in Google on the same term?

Mother-F****ing MSN!!!!!

Generally speaking, there is a certain comfort you can take when setting up your search campaigns that once everything is in place and has been QA'd (several times) that everything will remain how you left it until you actively participate in its changing. Makes sense, right? You set something to X, it stays X. MSN seems to find that boring.

On several of the MSN accounts managed at my agency, MSN has decided to simply remove the geo target settings we had put in place. When your client has a very desirable product that is quite literally available in only a few specific areas of one country on the entire planet, targeting globally is a fiercely efficient way to piss away your entire budget.

This of course comes on the heels of the "glitch" MSN experienced a few months ago where keyword bids were raised at random to sometimes astronomical heights. Imagine logging into your account and finding that MSN decided you wanted to bid $500 on a term you had origianlly set at $0.15. Totally sweet, right?

So thank you, MSN. Thank you for reminding me that as a search marketer I can never rest, not even for a moment, lest I be eaten alive by your unyielding dedication to failure.

Traditional Agencies... Jealous Of Search Marketers.

Was reading a clip from Search Insider this morning. It was a piece giving those of us not lucky enough to attend SES NYC this week a report on what has happened so far.

One of the blurbs listed was the following:

In-house - A lot of the information in this panel applied not just to in-house SEM managers, but to agencies and independents as well. Bill Hunt, CEO of Global Strategies International, talked a lot about the imperative to build business cases for search, even if it required "using crayons" to make stakeholders and executives understand. ...

Hunt also said that trust has been a major factor in corporate search success, and the marketing executives that he has worked with rely on their traditional agencies to lay out what is important in overall marketing strategy. So if the traditional agency isn't touting the importance of search, for whatever the reason, it's off the radar in the enterprise scenario, making the agency -- and in-house SEM job and campaign -- much less effective.

I don't think it's just traditional agencies that do this though. Until late last year, the agency I worked at (which was an Interactive agency) constantly undermined search. A client would come is looking to spend $10 million, and the biggest piece of that would go towards the Online Media team that bought non-search ad space.

This was very frustrating. Not only was search the most profitable in terms of return for the client, but it was the most profitable team at the agency. (SEO in particular. Very few purchased tools are needed to SEO. Sometimes none at all. This is where it's all about how intelligent you are. Not about your tools.)

Eventually, but not soon enough for my taste, this Interactive agency slowly began to "get it." Search is critical to your advertising efforts. This agency now has a search team that is a respectable size, with multiple levels of experience running it. And that is how it should be.

I'm surprised by how often I hear/read about search not being a major component to a company's online efforts. There is more than enough evidence out there to support and show that YOU NEED TO BE DOING SEARCH ACTIVELY. BOTH SEO AND PPC. (At least!)

Otherwise, you're just stupid.

Google Really Means "Don't Be Evil."

Not technically search marketing related... But still interesting.

I was reading the LA Times this morning when I saw an article on Google Earth's attempt to draw attention to the crisis in Darfur.

On Google Earth, if you look at the map of Africa, you will see the Darfur section outlined in Orange. Once you zoom in, you'll notice flames marking villages that have been destroyed.


I guess Google really holds true to their creed "Don't Be Evil."

Utah And Search Pirates?

Was reading an article from Media Post this afternoon about a new (crack pot) law that was passed in Utah that prevents companies from bidding on competitors' brand terms.

A quote from the article...

"In some cases people invest millions on their trademark, only to have their customers' on-line word searches shanghaied by a pirate who bought off the search engines," wrote Utah Senator Dan Eastman on his Web site. "In my mind this amounts to little more than a creative new kind of identity theft."

My question is, "exactly how is this going to work?" Does it apply to companies that are based in Utah? Or does it apply to any company in the whole universe?

I can tell you right now, I bid on competitor brand terms. And I have no plan to stop. In fact, here's an email I got from a competitor two months ago when their search manager noticed I had just begun bidding on their brand terms:

I work for XXXXXXXXX handling our search engine marketing campaigns. We recently starting buying your brand terms because we noticed you were purchasing ours. I'd like to speak to you about reaching a mutual agreement. Please feel free to email me or call me at (XXX)XXX-XXXX.

Basically, this competitor was pissed because I was driving up the cost of her brand terms. She said that if I stopped bidding on her terms, she would stop bidding on mine. And that was complete "hoo-haw." Because given my company's name and the industry, there is no way she could ever NOT bid on my brand terms.

Additionally, after doing some research, I calculated that I was actually making a nice return on her company's brand terms. So if I'm bringing in more traffic, and making money; there's no way I'm going to STOP bidding on her brand terms.

I never emailed her back after an initial exchange. And I continue to plunder her brand terms. (As she does mine.)

So you know what I say?

I say screw her. And screw Utah.

Put that in your pipe and smoke it!


ADDITION TO THIS POST:

PPC Ninja said that it should be pointed out that by bidding on your competitors' terms is good for the User experience.

PPC Ninja: "Coke and Pepsi have always mentioned each other in ads about taste tests. Direct comparison is always a fundimental part of marketing. But even more so in search."

He has an excellent point. If only companies are allowed to bid on their brand terms, it's not really useful to the User. Search is about choice. Even paid search. You should have options for paid ads like you do for organic listings.

So again, screw Utah!

Search Marketing = Always Having Food On Your Plate.

I don't know about you all, but it seems like I am always getting recruited for my search skillz.

Every week (and I kid you not), I get an email or phone call (unsolicited) from a recruiter who is searching on behalf of a large company looking for someone for search. Whether it be at an agency, engine or in-house somewhere.

Funny enough, I have been pitched by two of my current company's largest competitors. (I love my current company though, and am not going to leave any time soon.)

Everyone is looking for experienced search people. And if you can do both paid and organic, you've just doubled your salary. (If you're still early in your career.)

So if you work in search, and you are half-way decent at it, then you will never be out of work. (At least not anytime soon.) There are plenty of search jobs out there.

Screw 411. There's Some New Info In Town.

I don't know if this is old or new news... But I just heard about it, so there ya go.

It appears Google, creator of anything to make your Interactive life easier and more well-rounded, has come out with a new product... Google 411.

By dialing 1-800-GOOG-411 (1-800-466-4411) from your phone, you can search for a local business by name or by category; and can even get the info sent to you mobile phone via text message.

The best part about the service? It's FREE! Google doesn't charge you a connection fee.

Google adds a disclaimer to the product, reminding people that it's still in its experimental stage. So it might not always work. But still, very cool.

"It Sounds Like Really High Tech."

That's the response I get from people when I try to explain to them what it is I do for a living. They "kinda" get it. They always tell me how "unique" and "technical" it all sounds. But in reality it is not.

In reality, I am merely a keyword buyer.

But my focus has only recently become "keyword buying," or "paid search" as it is called in the industry. Prior to my current job, my focus was what we call "organic" or "natural search."

That means that I helped companies get their websites higher in search engines' non sponsored listings. And for some reason, people always think it's just "technical" elements that matter. But that's not the case. It's mostly a creative job. In fact, I don't even know HTML. If you asked me to code something, I'd look at you like you had a herpes outbreak. I just don't do "coding." I don't do "technical" stuff. There are smarter and more experienced people to do that. I am a writer.

And writers, to put it bluntly, make the best search engine optimizers.

So both paid and organic search are not "rocket science." And don't let anyone try to convince you otherwise. Search does take a logical person, one who can connect the dots. But a lot of it is "trial and error."

Search rules change all the time. Your strategy has to change too. And if you can't adapt, you'll be left behind. But it's not hard. It' s not "like really high tech."