Blogging, email, IM, and telephone make it easy to keep in touch with your real
friends. Social networks are hyped, but tend to have low value traffic because
they don't effectively separate signal from noise. The only people who have time
for them are people hawking crap, people looking to waste time, and spam bots.

Source - WebNewsPro - The Web's Largest Social Network

While this is quite true, and we do see a lot of spam and time wasters on Orkut, it still has a pretty big database of young people who know their way around the internet. There are enough of products / advertisers out that consider such an audience their target market.

Google should allow advertisers to advertise on Orkut through demographic targets and targeting on specific communities.

The problem with something like Orkut though is that its geographic reach is too skewed.

And there is also a lot of competition. Facebook seems to be the biggest rage currently around here. Of course the other thing about such networks is that very few have truly unique users. Users register everywhere and anywhere. Same is the case in Matrimonial Sites and Job Portals. There is little value to such a property then cause how can you differentiate yourself to sell better if everyone else has what you have?

The evolution of data mining and analysis

Was reading an article on WebProNew about how Web Analytics is 'maturing'. Anil Batra talk about an article by Nick Sharp titled Web Analytics is dead.

To quote a little -

Marketers have turned their focus away from examining the activity on their website to include the results they’re achieving in other areas of online marketing, such as search campaigns, banner ads and e-mail tools. As a result, they’re not just looking for tools that measure their site performance, but also a way of bringing together the solutions they use to measure and track their online marketing in one single system.

This is why we see web analytics evolving into marketing performance management (MPM), which gives marketers a complete picture of their online marketing performance so they can manage and improve on campaigns across their website, online marketing channels and customer marketing programmes.

This is a very important point because it would help figure out a lot of things (Anil Batra mentions quite a few) most importantly 'quality' of visitors vis-a-vis medium of entry.

Analytics also does a lot in saying what visitors do on a website (of course an average doesn't help). Ideally a website should be able to track their visitors by demographic (age, gender, income, profession [would be great], etc) which can be done if you have a login based system, by mode of entry, by browsing / buying trend / pattern. Of course all data that is collected is based on the kind of website etc.

Averages in analytics aren't very helpful because each individual can be placed into a specific segment of the whole market.

It is also sad to see that most companies do not give enough importance to analytics. There is great insight in understand who visitors are and what they do. The amount of profitability for a company can increase by 2 times sometimes, by just implementing small changes.

IP exclusion tool

Who would have thought this would ever be a reality? Not me.
The tool would work like a site exclusion tool. Currently you can exclude upto 20 IPs. Your ads would not even be shown to the IPs excluded so not change of click fraud from those IPs. I assume that over time they will increase this number of exclusion allowed.

Google now helps you create better ads

What more could you have asked for?

Google released a new tool today that helps advertisers write better ad copy. This tool would ask you for some specific questions related to the business you wish to advertise, ask preference of certain call to actions, and then gives a bunch of text ads that you can directly use in your campaign.

Will try and see if I can get some more screenshots.

It is pretty interesting because these ads must be incorporating lines that might be 'superior'.

Also this seems to be the only new tool that seems will help small advertisers and not agencies (only).

Seen this before?

The same ads one below the other -

Ad Scheduling

[I am currently only on Adwords]

The other day I had to set up Ad Scheduling and what a little baffled that while they provide advertisers the flexibility to choose Max CPCs at different times of the day, they do not let advertisers decide different daily budgets.

I feel the latter might be a little more helpful because it me it makes more sense. What is the point of lowering CPC, moving down in average position and rising lowered Quality Score?

Of course everything is based on objectives of a campaign and what functionality is used and how would be relevant to goals to be achieved but I think advertisers should have an option to choose functionality, which isn't available now.

WebmasterWorld

Logged in after a long time and I must say I feel like kicking myself for being away for so long.

Some interesting things I read (since they are out of context, they might not seem that interesting but they are) -

Your average ad position may be 3.2 but this means that your ad placement could be fluctuating between 1 and 5.2 and this discrepancy could surface from one search query to the next

I forget to think like this at times.



On why you should by longer phrases of your word instead of just a single broad match keyword -

The other advantage is that Google sees each individual word as a unique keyword with a unique history, quality score, CTR, etc. Broad "catch all" keywords historically have lower CTR's than the longer, more specific keywords so your competitor with one broad keyword can work hard at improving his landing page and testing new ads but he will probably never beat your CTR's.