Online Social Networks Are changing the face of marketing
The B2B (business to business) Marketing on Social Networks (like Facebook, Orkut and LinkedIn) report shows the growth of business-oriented networks.
As you know the popularity of LinkedIn is increasing day by day. Reports show that LinkedIn users have more than doubled in the past year.
Now even Facebook is becoming a business network as more business people join, B2B marketers are reconsidering the social network environment.
Advertising expenditures will also increase as the number business users are increasing in these networks. The estimation is that it will reach $210 million in 2012.
Marketers will now spend far more over the next few years to create and manage their own social networks for business customers, partners, suppliers and vendors.

San Francisco Chronicle and San Jose Mercury News First Customers to Go Live

In simple words APT from Yahoo! is a digital advertising solution. It helps to streamline the process of planning, buying and optimizing display advertising.
It is designed to buy/sell ads online in a simple way, while connecting all the market players -- publishers, advertisers, agencies, networks, partners and developers
APT is a single platform for connected digital advertising, including ad serving, ad network and ad exchange. It is designed to streamline advertisers' ad-buying process for multiple accounts across multiple publishers, and enable creative testing and campaign optimization. It also helps advertisers to easily identify audiences through geographic, demographic and interest-based targeting.

Key advantages of APT from Yahoo!

The ability to connect to new business partners for cross-selling
Providing ad selection and inventory management tools to match relevant ads to marketers' target audience
Publishers can create their own private network.

Some of the initial capabilities featured in the new platform include

Guaranteed cross-selling with pre-defined selling rules
Audience targeting techniques based upon behavior and geography
Filters for better controls around creative
Flexible and powerful APIs
Federated ad call to support multiple ad formats

Yahoo! will start to make the platform available to other parties including advertisers, publishers, networks and agencies in 2009.
Additional information on APT is available at http://apt.yahoo.com.

The first mobile phone to use Google Inc's Android mobile operating software will cost $199
The phone which has features like a slide-out keypad, is being manufactured by Taiwan's HTC Corp. This will be sold by Deutsche Telekom's T-Mobile USA unit, They are planning to unveil the device at an event in New York on September 23.
The only U.S. operator selling Apple Inc's iPhone is AT&T Inc. They have set the price of the latest version at $199 in July and this became a benchmark for smartphones that can surf the Web, manage email and other multimedia features.

Online

Text Ads
Google text ads are four lines of text:
A title of 25 characters, two lines of ad text with 35 characters each and a URL line. This format of text ads may differ on partner sites. For example, your ad text may appear on a single line.

Image ads
Images ads are just graphical AdWords ads. It will appear on select content sites in the Google network. Unlike traditional online graphical ads, image ads can be matched to a page's content.

Video ads
Video ads also appear on content sites in the Google network, but they are user-initiated. A user must click "play" to watch your ad. Think of video ads as a type of commercial on the Internet.

Mobile ads
Mobile ads appear on mobile websites as texts or images and direct users to your mobile website. Mobile text ads can also appear when users search Google from a mobile device. You need to have a mobile web site to run a mobile ad.

Offline

TV ads
Through your AdWords account, you can launch even a TV campaign. This is available to advertisers located only in the United States and billed in U.S. dollars.

Print ads
Now you can place your ads in newspapers across the United States using Google AdWords. You can choose from more than 750 newspapers, and set a price that matches your budget..

Audio ads
You can even broadcast your message on over 1,600 radio stations across the U.S. It is just like traditional radio commercials. But if you do it through AdWords, it is easier to buy and manage. This is also available for advertisers located in US.

Google extended its lead in US Web Search to 63% share of the market in August. This is the biggest monthly gain in 5 months.
Yahoo Inc, (No. 2 player in the U.S. Web search market) has a drop of 0.9% to 19.6 from July while Microsoft, (No. 3 U.S), slipped 0.6% to 8.3 %, according to ComScore Inc.
IAC InterActiveCorp's Ask.com retained its 4th position with an increase of 0.3% percent while Time Warner Inc's AOL edged up 0.1 percent to 4.3 percent.
ComScore estimates that the number of searches performed by U.S. Web surfers on the five top search engines was virtually unchanged at 11.75 billion searches compared with July.

After setting up a Web site, the next question which is best:- PPC (Pay Per Click) or SEO (Search Engine Optimization). If you consider the pro’s and con’s of each you will find the answer easily

Search Engine Optimization
For a new Web site, whatever you do you are not going to be in the number 1 position for quite sometime. However, you will never rank in the top 50 (pages) unless you do undertake some form of search engine optimization program

Pay-Per-Click (PPC)
Pay Per Click campaigns will generate traffic to your Web site. The more traffic you generate, the more your site will be seen and the better the possibility for natural links to your site. Obviously, if your site is a commercial site then PPC will bring extra traffic targeted to your keywords and hopefully ready to open their wallets
From the above two short descriptors, you are probably already trying to organize your first PPC campaign. Just wait a moment and reread them, particularly the last sentence in the search engine optimization brief.

So the answer is “both” You need to do PPC as well as SEO if you want your web site to succeed. Search engine optimization will provide long term benefits for free. So you don’t have to pay to get them on search engines on SEO. This will generate organic visitors from the search engines like Google and Yahoo. But in PPC you have to pay for each click.
If you don’t have big amount to play around and you are a beginner stay away from PPC. It will eat your money like anything

Difference between Short Description and Long Description

A short description (up to 70 characters) is the brief summary of the products or services that you want to advertise. As you have the character limit of 70 you should be so creative in expressing your service.

Short descriptions are now required when you create or modify an ad.
A long description (up to 190 characters) is a detailed summary of the products or services that you want to advertise. It will not be displayed on the Yahoo! search. It is displayed on partner sites that can accommodate longer descriptions.
Long descriptions are optional

How should I organize my keywords in ad groups?

These are best practices
• Make sure all keywords in an ad group are very closely related to one another. The “tighter” the ad group is, the more likely you are to write ads that relate to all of your keywords.
• Don’t put the same keywords in multiple ad groups, because they will compete against themselves. Two exceptions to this practice are using the same keywords in both geo-targeted and non-geo-targeted campaigns, or using the same keyword for different seasonal campaigns. For example, you can use the keyword “gift baskets” for both a Valentine’s Day campaign and a Mother’s Day campaign.
• Keep what’s working! Remove, or just move, low performers so they don’t negatively impact your ad quality and you don’t waste too much time monitoring them.

A few updates from Google

Now the quality score will be calculated at the time of each search query
So according to Google the quality score will be more accurate

There will not be any keywords which are marked as “Inactive for Search” because now they are evaluated for every relevant query

No more minimum bids. This will be replaced by “First page bid estimates”.
But I have seen KWs which are bidding Rs 60 and at avg pos of 3.5 with a comment First page bid estimate is Rs 207. Is it a foul play by Google?
No AdWords report will give this data. We have to go through each KW.

3 tips to capture more impressions and clicks through hot happenings

Between the presidential elections, the Olympics in Beijing, and NASA Messenger’s second flyby past Mercury, 2008 is a year of big events. Search marketers should take note.
Why? Because whether you’re dealing with a nationwide political decision, an international sports event, or a hot dog eating contest, “big events” can drive serious search activity. And if your business has a reason to connect with those “big event” searchers—say, you’re a political publication covering the presidential campaign, a sports magazine with Olympics coverage, or a hot dog vendor—you can use that event-driven search to engage those searchers in a meaningful conversation.
Here are three hot tips on how to start talking about that big event:

1. Don’t forget to add the keyword
If you’re hoping to capitalize on a big event, your first course of action should be to remember to advertise in search for that event to begin with.
This sounds obvious. But I can’t tell you how many sports sites with dedicated Olympics sections, news sites with Election ’08 coverage, and science and nature magazines with NASA Messenger images have failed to advertise on crucial event keywords like “candidates 2008” or “mercury photos.” Those businesses have ended up hidden on relevant search terms—and they’ve missed out on a window of opportunity.
Don’t lose out on these opportunities. If you offer something of value to a sudden influx of searchers, let them know about it by advertising the appropriate keywords Yahoo! Sponsored Search.

2. Beware of ambiguous terms
Search terms like “presidential candidates 2008” are clearly event-related. But other terms are more ambiguous. “Cycling,” for example, could represent a search for an Olympic bike race, or it could be a search from someone who wants to buy a bicycle or is planning a long bike ride of her own.
Since big events are short-lived and capture popular interest, big event search marketers face a real challenge from ambiguous keywords such as these. That’s because big events can create sudden, diverging meanings for the same term. On the July 4th weekend, a search for “hot dogs” might be a search for the processed meat (as it usually is year-round); but it might also be a search for übereater Takeru Kobayashi, in anticipation of the annual Nathan’s Hot Dog Eating Contest. Confusion—and wasted search spend—can ensue.
As a rule, your attitude toward ambiguous keywords should be determined by your search budget. The less you have to spend, the warier you should be of ambiguous event terms. If you’re interested in scale, though, advertising on those ambiguous terms may be a worthwhile gamble. You might attract a lot of bike shoppers to your Olympics pages, but you’ll capture a lot more Olympic cycling enthusiasts, too.

3. Say it with creative
If you do decide to advertise on ambiguous search terms, your ad should let searchers know exactly what you offer—and, by implication, what you don’t offer. For example, if your site features Olympics coverage and you’re advertising on the keyword “cycling,” make sure that your ad copy explains that you feature Olympics scores, articles, and videos—and not sales on Schwinns. “See Olympic Cycling Photos” might be a better ad title than simply “Cycling,” or even “Men’s Cycling.”
If you use your ad copy to tell searchers exactly what you offer, feature or sell, you’ll get fewer of the wrong kinds of searchers—and more of the right ones—clicking on your ad.
Do you have your own strategies for running search campaigns around a big event? Post your comments below. Maybe I’ll talk about your suggestions at my next conference…and then, of course, you could advertise in Yahoo! Sponsored Search around the event.

Source: Yahoo Search Marketing Newsletter

CR and CTR are not comparable between the search network and content network because users browsing content approach ads differently than users searching for a particular topic. So Google use smart pricing to protect advertiser ROI by automatically adjusting the cost of a contextually-targeted content network click based on its effectiveness compared to a search click.
As Search and Content network statistics can differ, looking into aggregate statistics for a particular campaign running on both the networks may not give you the exact performance of your account.

Now Google has made necessary changes in the interface, where you can see the performance of your search & content networks separately.

This option is already available in Yahoo Search Marketing.

In Google, now we have a “Statistics” drop down menu lets you to change your view to see search and content network statistics in individual rows for each of your campaigns

Google has announced the beta version of a new open source brouser Google Chrome.

The name is derived from the graphical user interface frame, or "chrome", of web browsers. Chromium is the name of the open source project behind Google Chrome, released under the BSD license.

 

Chrome periodically downloads updates of two blacklists (one for phishing and one for malware) and warns users when they attempt to visit a harmful site

 

Each tab in Chrome is sandboxed into its own process to "prevent malware from installing itself" or "using what happens in one tab to affect what happens in another". Following the principle of least privilege, each process is stripped of its rights and can compute but can not write files or read from sensitive areas (e.g. documents, desktop)—this is similar to "Protected Mode" that is used by Internet Explorer 7 on Windows Vista. The Sandbox Team is said to have "taken this existing process boundary and made it into a jail";for example malicious software running in one tab is unable to sniff credit card numbers, interact with the mouse or tell "Windows to run an executable on start-up" and will be terminated when the tab is closed. This enforces a simple computer security model whereby there are two levels of multilevel security (user andsandbox) and the sandbox can only respond to communication requests initiated by the user.

Plugins such as Adobe Flash Player are typically not standardised and as such cannot be sandboxed like tabs. These often need to run at or above the security level of the browser itself. To reduce exposure to attack, plugins are run in separate processes that communicate with the renderer, itself operating at "very low privileges" in dedicated per-tab processes. Plugins will need to be modified to operate within this software architecture while following the principle of least privilege.

 

Chrome supports the Netscape Plugin Application Programming Interface (NPAPI) but does not support the embedding of ActiveXcontrols. Also, Chrome does not have an extension system such as Mozilla-compatible *.xpi cross-platform extension architecture and thus XPI-based extensions such as AdBlock and GreaseMonkey can not be adapted to Chrome.

A private browsing feature called Incognito mode is provided as well. It prevents the browser from storing any history information or cookies from the websites visited. This is similar to the private browsing feature available in the latest beta version of Internet Explorer 8

 

It has a simple and intuitive user interface and an entirely new architecture. According to Google it is designed for speed, security, and stability while browsing the Internet.

 

Google Chrome uses the same open source rendering engine as Apple's Safari browser (WebKit), so your landing pages and sites should appear in Google Chrome as they do in Apple Safari. The way users interact with ads and sites should be similar as well.

Source: Wikipedia