Today is just to recap what happened recently with Google, Yahoo, Singapore Market to make sure that we don’t miss out important information:
1. Singapore Market:
- The first Search Marketing Expo (SMX) ever was hold in Singapore during the two days 13 and 14 of Oct. However, the response from the market to this event was unfortunately poor.
There can be many reasons:
+) The ticket fee is too expensive?
+) The scheduled content is too complicated?
+) It was organized too close to Ad Tech?
+) Financial crisis so companies cut down in terms of budget to send marketing managers to these types of events?
In any case, i do hope that the next SMX will be much better with not only local but regional audience as well
- Singapore is in recession which has been discussed over and over everywhere… I still firmly believe in the growth of Search Engine Marketing in Singapore and the region though.
2. Google Updates:
- Separated metrics for Google.com and Google Search partners are now available in Google Adwords.
From the above screenshot, it seems that Google reports every metric up to conversion figures, provided that you use Google conversion tracking/Google Analytics.
This no doubt provides more information. However, i wonder what kinda of action one can take from knowing these data to optimize a Pay per Click campaign?
One obvious action is that you can choose to run on Google Only or Google and Search network under Campaign Setting.
However, i always use third party analytics technology to track the performance of any PPC campaigns so this news is yet to prove ground breaking to me.
- Adwords Editor new version is ready to download. We are at version 6.5 now.
I am yet to be able to try the Keyword Opportunities tool. Every time i tried, it says Authentication failed.
Another thing i notice is that my Adwords editor crashes more often both at work and at home, especially with Vista, deleted ad copies appear again etc… something weird is going on here
- Google UK allows gambling ads now. This is another big move by Google, which potentially can help the company to earn millions per year in an over saturated UK market.
Earlier this year, Google already allowed bidding on competitor terms in US and UK.
It looks like slowly but surely Google is trying relax its editorial policy as much as possible to earn more and satisfy share holders. (Btw, Google beats market expectation again with its strong 3Q profits)
3. Yahoo updates
- Well there are not much updates from Yahoo side except the rumor about Microsoft started its bid for Yahoo again. You probably read the news somewhere else. Yahoo share price increased quite a bit because of the rumors, which only shows how desparated Yahoo is at the moment.
- Yahoo Search Marketing platform (YSM) is still unreliable as usual. It was really frustrated on Friday where we couldn’t log in to pull out data for our report for the whole morning.
We also realized on Friday that when you import the csv file into YSM, we need to pay special attention to the campaign start date format. This is very tricky but it costed us 1 hour to figure out why our upload didn’t work. We got the correct date but the date format was incorrect…
I am hoping that YSM interface continues to “perform” a couple of more times and Liz will be pissed enough to write a couple of lines about it. 😀
- Nevertheless, I read a new blog post on Yahoo Search Marketing Blog today, which supprisingly offers good insights/advices.
The post titled “Scaring Up Clicks” by Noah Belson, Content Quality Analyst. He/She advised against spending too much time on keyword research/campaign for candy retailers. The reason is that “candy keywords are not heavily searched during the Halloween season” or consumers prefer to buy candy offline/locally. This is really a good tip for US market.
The second advice is about using geo targeting for your non geo targeted keywords, which is not something new but still it’s sound.
That should be all for now. If you think i miss out any important news, please let me know.
Good night,
Chandler