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Traffick - Andrew Goodman

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Wikified Google Search: Digging a Hole So You Can Fill it Back In?Yesterday

Back in July, Traffick writer Matt Larkin reviewed Google's beta test of some Digg-like features. He saw little to recommend.

Now that Google has rolled out this "Wikified search experience" nightmare, the very chilling prospect arises that Google has finally decided to ruin itself without provocation. In tennis terms it would be called an "unforced error."

It may be just a visceral reaction, but I'm with Arrington, who just pleads with Google to just turn this thing off and stop this cult of the amateur world from spilling over from YouTube into the one workable, reliable techno-thing that is for many of us truly sacred.

Sure, the main thrust of the functionality might be so you can build your own personal search preferences, and leave notes for yourself. But it's a slippery slope, isn't it? With such a big headcount churning away on cool stuff, the real danger is that change for change's sake becomes a way of life.

Facebook's Long, Long HaulYesterday

Never let it be said that Silicon Valley companies aren't built to last.

Sheryl Sandberg, Facebook's COO, says they're in this for "20 to 30 years". In 30 years, Sandberg will be 68. Check back then.

In 30 years, even Zuckerberg will be getting short of breath.

Meanwhile, wags are wondering if Jerry Yang's recent re-appointment as Chief Yahoo makes him Yahoo for Life.

And everyone knows the three leaders of Google have made a pact among themselves to still be at the helm of the company in 20 (or was it 30?) years.

Promising never to retire: it's the ultimate Silicon Valley status symbol. I guess Steve Jobs must have started it.

Is Your Paid Search Agency Paying Attention?Yesterday

I was just going through a White Paper by an agency on the subject of paid search quality scores. I hate to be picky, but if your intent is to explain keyword auctions to your clients, then factual errors don't really sit well with me. In outlining the history, this paper essentially said that Google invented Quality Score to deal with relevancy issues in 2005, and prior to that everything was a pure auction a la GoTo.

As most of you know, CTR has been baked into Google's CPC search advertising auction since 2002!

Another problem with their very brief "analysis" was failing to explain the separate roles of keyword relevancy related quality, and landing page quality. It's a cool factoid to tell people that landing page load times matter (rarely, if they're really poor like above 12 seconds), but not if that gets people optimizing the heck out of already qualified, relevant landing pages, and misinterpreting the weighting of these factors in the ranking system. Google doesn't tell us the weightings, but anyone who's worked on a few dozen accounts (or actually paid attention to those accounts) knows that landing page issues create poor quality in rare cases, but "optimizing" an already good landing page is something you do, as the fitness magazines say, "for you" (for your own conversion rates)... the fun you have with landing pages shouldn't generally impact your ad rank too much as long as the page in question doesn't suck, isn't evil, etc.

So,

Q3 Internet Advertising Revenues: Soft (Except for Google)November 20

It's a bit surreal to juxtapose today's release from the IAB -- Internet Advertising Revenues for Q3 at $5.9 billion -- with Google's earnings release of last month, related to their Q3 earnings.

Since Google's revenues were $5.54 billion, you're apt to say: what the heck is going on here?

The IAB figures cover the U.S. only, of course.

But if you subtract Google's international revenues, their U.S.-only revenues for the quarter were all of $2.69 billion. So in the United States, this one company appears to be clocking about 46% of the revenues for the whole digital advertising sector. Twiddle a few knobs, and wait a quarter, and Google will be at around 50%. Among other things, you would imagine that this makes further acquisitions dicey for Google. One company moving from, say, 50% to 58% of share for an entire sector of such importance might make certain regulators nervous. (Not saying it's right, but that's sort of how the world works.)

Whether that's proof that Google is incredibly big, or the rest of the sector remains embarrassingly small given the gallons of ink devoted to it, I'll leave to your discretion. A third possibility is that display and other forms of online advertising have yet to reach the peak of efficiency achieved by Google

Andrew Goodman says...November 18

You gotta keep it in perspective.

Google was kind enough to share with me this evening a new take on their now multi-faceted keyword research tool lineup. I tinkered a bit, but between knocking off work at a reasonable 7:00 p.m., going to the gym, shopping for tasteful late-fall v-necks, and eating dinner, it seems I finished the evening without a single thing to say about Google's new product rollout, other than: I look forward to playing around with it. But seriously: that's work, and I didn't play with it very much after the news embargo lifted at 8:30 p.m. my time.

The real story is over at Mike Grehan's place (blog, I mean). On Sunday, as you can see beautifully laid out in his extensive post, he posted the full account of his day accompanying Incisive Media's Matt McGowan on a Veteran's Day adventure of a lifetime -- ("is this unreal or what?"). Read on a bit, to the previous day's post, and you get an inkling of another development in the search marketing events world: Matt's recent promotion. Well known to many as VP of