In March 2007 Google launched a US beta test of a new Pay Per Click model known as Pay Per Action:
“Google this week announced through the official AdWords blog a new advertising payment model, Pay Per Action or PPA. Pay Per Action is aimed at websites that have a goal in mind when targeting visitors, these goals for instance could be a purchase, an enquiry or any other site specific action. This is due to the pricing model of Pay Per Action; quite simply you only pay when the visitor reaches your goal or action.”
Last week Google went global with the beta, to be eligible to utilise the beta test you must currently utilise the Google AdWords conversion tracking and your campaign must have received more than 500 conversions in the last 30 days. If eligible you will be automatically alerted within your AdWords account.
For more news and information on Pay Per Action (PPA) please visit the Google PPA help centre.
June 29th, 2007 - No Comments »
Posted in PPC Management | Tags: adwords, google, ppc, PPC Management
If you are based in the states and do indeed listen to the radio on the internet the chances are you heard very little yesterday as many online radio stations fell silent in protest. The radio stations were protesting about the increase in royalty fees and urged their listeners to contact congress to complain about the royalty increase and support the stations.
Many listeners did indeed contact congress, leading to the congressional switchboards being constantly engaged and their servers overloaded. If you are interested in the fight of the online radio stations read more at the RAIN – Radio And Internet Newsletter website.
June 29th, 2007 - No Comments »
Posted in General |
Currently top level domains are decided and issued by ICANN (The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers) and they issue them in three different categories, Country (.uk .fr .tv), Commerce (.com .biz .aero) and Institutional Organisations (.gov .mil .edu). However this may change, ICANN are meeting this week in Paris and the BBC report that they are voting on whether to open up TLD registration so that businesses and individuals can register their own TLDs. Companies could register their name or even a brand. Examples of this could be websites ending in .Microsoft or .McDonalds rather than .com.
It is rumoured that if the TLDs were released it would be at a cost in the region of $30,000 to £50,000 unless the domain is contested in which case the domain may be auctioned to the highest bidder. Dr Paul Twomey, chief executive of ICANN, told BBC News “We are doing this on a cost recovery basis. We’ve already spent $10m on this,” so it is unlikely to ever be a cheap affair.
These domains could impact online marketing including SEO and PPC in many ways. Currently Google uses a site’s TLD to geographically identify its location and possible audience, so how will search engines develop to list new TLDs alongside existing sites, could the age of a site become more important when competing with newer TLD’s? Will the TLD alone be given priority if it matches a search query?
User’s perceptions may change with them giving preference to either TLD or current domain names so it will be important to establish a strong online brand and customer base before any changes are made to reduce the impact on your website. As domains will be limited to 64 characters users may end up finding it difficult to remember each companies TLD compared to the current .co.uk or .com but brand strength and increasingly efficient search engines will surely overcome this.
As the meeting of ICANN is taking place this week hopefully in the near future there will be an announcement to clarify their intentions and outline further details.
June 25th, 2007 - No Comments »
Posted in General | Tags: google, ppc, seo
With the increase in network traffic, that Cisco predict, making sure that your website is optimised to allow users to find you and your products is even more important. Optimisation is still going to include traditional search engine optimisation (SEO) and pay per click (PPC) but is likely to also include new advert delivery methods that are born from the shift in internet users browsing habits.
Before television, newspapers were the main source of advertising then television surpassed that. With the evolution of the internet, marketing to customers when they are looking for a product became possible but most online advertising resembled newspaper ads made from text and mainly static images. As internet users increasingly accept online videos, advertising may once again see a development from text to television style adds as the predominate advertising method. For this to occur there will have to be the ability to dynamically match the videos content, users location and demographic with the advertisers core messages and products of their adverts with software combining the media to seamlessly deliver it to the user.
Existing marketing campaign methods will surely remain at the core of future marketing plans but with new channels of communication with a potentially large audience appear new methods of marketing will have to be considered.
EDIT – 25 June 2008 – The future may be affected by the new top levels domain changes proposed by ICANN as discussed in the blog ’ICANN may shake up Top Level Domains (TLDs)’ on 25/06/08
June 24th, 2007 - No Comments »
Posted in Search Engine Optimisation | Tags: content strategy, ppc, seo
Cisco have released their annual report projecting the future of internet traffic. The prediction is that internet traffic is likely to double year on year from now until 2012. By 2012 internet traffic is expected to reach half a zettabyte. It is hard to compare any existing data structures, storage facilities or network traffic figures to half a zettabyte. What is a Zettabyte? Let’s start with the more commonly known gigabyte and work from there.
Gigabyte = 1000 Megabytes
Terabyte = 1000 Gigabytes
Petabyte = 1000 Terabytes
Exabyte = 1000 Petabytes
Zettabyte = 1000 Exabytes or 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 bytes
These figures are still incomprehensible but when you consider that a Zettabyte is equal to 250billion DVDs which if they were stacked on top of one another would make 7 stacks capable of reaching the moon with a total height of 2,750,000km.
This traffic increase is predicted due to the increasing use of video and web 2.0 including social networking. This increase is illustrated by the BBCs intention of streaming BBC 1 programming over the internet in 2009. The strain on ISP seems to be showing no sign of slowing, will the country’s infrastructure cope?
June 23rd, 2007 - 1 Comment »
Posted in General | Tags: search stat
