Warmest Greetings,

:: Tuesday, November 25, 2003 ::

SEO and ROI. Not just pocket change anymore.
Case Study: 3000% ROI for Macdonald Hotels

"Since launching the search engine marketing campaign, Ambergreen has maintained a sixfold increase in weekly traffic to Macdonald Hotels.

With a solid return on investment of 29:1 the campaign has extended to encompass seasonal variations and Macdonald Hotels continues to receive £29 back for every £1 spent with Ambergreen."

Google Baseball.

It's hard to travel the SEO circuit and not notice the hysteria about Google. It's SERPS (search engine results pages) have pitched high balls, low balls, fast balls, slow balls, and out of bounds balls. SEO's are tossing their bats in the air in frustration. Google searchers likely could care less what's happening on the field as long the SERPs give them something relevant to watch (use).

Google Soap Channel

So, who is going to buy the Google team when it goes up for sale, and how? (It's not if it goes up for sale. The dramatic story line now is that Google will be offering shares...) Fortune magazine looks at this in Will Google Be Giggling?

"The debate is between two possibilities. The first is that Google will conduct its IPO the bad old way, by allowing investment bankers to sell to their clients a relatively small chunk of the company at a price the bankers determine.

The second is that Google will conduct an online auction for its initial public shares, a process that would be likely to yield Google more upfront money and would be considered more fair than the current process."

Scream here.

Update Postmortem-- sifting through the rubble

"Why would Google wreck its future for a fast buck this Christmas? It would be complete madness."

"The evidence is there for the viewing, couldn't actually be any clearer. There IS a filter in place for certain phrases and it is a conscious decision on their part."

"Since many of the terms that are used in Adwords are those that have been highly optimized by spammers and others, Google is using the high bid Adwords phrases as a Dictionary in the current anti-spam filter (Post Florida as the Google watchers say). In other words, Google is assuming a correlation between SEO-spamming and high bid terms. This would also encourage such website owners to use Adwords, but this may be an incidental side-effect for Google (albeit very profitable)."

"It smells like a way of detecting (and degrading) people who have used 'organic' SEO where Google would rather they were spending money on AdWords.

Those hit are primarily people who have engaged in SEO campaigns: i.e. are potential customers proven to be knowing the value of, and/or happy to spend money to attain, good positions in search."

Recent Shift in Ranks

"Friday night, I used the "Dissatisfied with your search results? Help us improve." link to report a WPG-generated doorway page and it dissappeared within 8 hours."

"My point is, don't put it past google to eventually focus itself on trying to maximize it's profit. The day they put more focus into the Ad Words was the day the ceased to be strictly a search engine. They are now a marketing enhanced search engine."

"I'm just looking forward to Yahoo and Microsoft making their moves."

About those AdSense ads...

This Boston Globe story, As Google grows, critics emerge wonders "Do you hate Google yet?"

"This was the first time we'd ever been able to make a little money with our content," Powazek said. "To be unceremoniously booted with no warning, with no recourse, was like twisting the knife."

Yes Virginia. I found other neat stuff.

Defending Organic Search - The other side of the Comscore IAB study by Gordon Hotchkiss

"This summer the IAB and ComScore released the first major study on the effectiveness of sponsored search advertising. Not surprisingly, considering the study was sponsored by Overture and Google, the report was very favorable towards sponsored search, often at the expense of organic search.

My concern is that if you don’t look beyond the numbers presented in the ComScore/IAB Study, you would assume that organic search is a waste of time and budget. For reasons I’ll go into shortly, this is simply not the case."

The Webby Report

Search Engine Strategies Conference & Expo 2003 – Münche Our friend Alan Webb, CEO of ABAKUS Internet Marketing, reports back.

"Another important confirmation involved the indexation of dynamic webpages. Mr. Schmitt confirmed that Google will index dynamic pages with up to 2 parameters, but has problems with more than that. This wasn't so well known and gives a guideline for seos planning on mod_rewrite/isapi filters."

Thanks Alan!

Stay tuned. Tomorrow I talk turkey.

:: posted by Kim Krause Berg on 11/25/2003 10:48:37 AM

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