Wiseaff

Broad Match Can Cause Unintentional Trademark Abuse

Lori Weiman does a good job laying out an important issue that many search markerters have fallen trap to in her blog post on Search Engine Land called "Does Auto-Matching Cause Unintentional Trademark Abuse?"

"Google and Yahoo, by way of the auto-matching feature, can show your ads on keywords that you did not intend to sponsor."

At imwave we have run into this a number of times.  With Google they will take your broad match terms and display the ads on competitive trademarks you didn't ask for or know they were going to choose.  Running a broad match term like "sneakers" doesn't mean you will only show up under terms like "basketball sneakers" and "tennis sneakers", but they may match your ad up to shoes, boots, sandals, or terms like nike, adidas, etc...  At Yahoo the situation gets even worse!  Not only will they start displaying your ad under these brand terms, they will actually sometimes adjust your ad copy (without telling you) to include these keywords in headlines so that they get higher click through rates!!!  This can be very annoying when you have agreed to follow strict brand guidelines, and then Yahoo decides they know better!

What is the solution?  You can stop running broad and advanced matching, but that is going to leave A LOT of opportunity on the table.  The only other solution I know of is to work with your clients to establish a good list of negative keywords that you know you don't want your ads to appear on.

I'd love to hear your experiences with this issue.

ExitJunction - A Great Way to Kill your PPC Search Campaigns

I got some spam this morning from a new company called ExitJunction offering to pay you to show invisable ads on your website.  When visitors come to your site from a search engine, they will hijack the back button and show ads when the visitors try to click back to the search engine.

One of google's rules for PPC search is that the back button must bring the visitor back to the search page, so there goes any PPC ads you are running with Google, I am not sure if the other search engines demand the same.

If they are checking that for PPC, they might be checking that for SEO as well, so you might just kill all your search traffic to your site.

What a bargain!

Ask.com's Click Fraud Settlement Coupon Code

So ASK as finally settled their click fraud case, and we got a whopping $12.13 back as a coupon code, the only catch is you have to apply the coupon as a credit against the purchase of at least 2 times that amount in advertising.

"Your advertising coupon may be applied to up to 50% of the cost of online advertising purchased from Ask."

With no plans to advertise on ASK again in the near future, I have a $12.13 coupon code up for grabs.  Anyone still advertising on ASK????

Leave a comment below requesting the coupon code and it's yours.

What will happen to Yahoo?

The battle over Yahoo has been heating up!  This report from Fortune Magazine indicates that Yahoo is in advanced talks with Time Warner to merge with AOL.  In this deal Yahoo would also take on some cash and buy back some of their stock to prevent a Microsoft hostile take over.

The article additionally talks about Yahoo testing running Google ads...

"Yahoo is also looking at a possible advertising deal with Google (GOOG). Just hours before the news leaked of Yahoo’s advanced talks with AOL, the Internet portal announced that it would run a preliminary two-week test to run Google’s search advertising."

Wow, the various ways this deal might go down are mind boggling.

I think this industry would be a lot better if we had a stronger competitor to Google.  A Yahoo / Microsoft merger, or even a Yahoo / AOL merger would be ok, but I don't think the market place looks good of all of Yahoo's traffic is monetized by Google ads.  Sure this might simplify the ad buying process, but Google is a moving target, and I don't think we all want to be more beholden to one source of traffic and revenues.

Personally, I would like to see Yahoo and AOL merge, and then see Microsoft buy them, that would increase the traffic and make make an interesting ad buying opportunity and alternative to Google ads.

5% Cash Back on Yahoo Search Marketing!

Do you run PPC ads on Yahoo Search Marketing?

I just looked at my AMEX bill, and now when you spend money on Yahoo Search Marketing, or on other Yahoo Small Business services, American Express will give you 5% cash back (up to $500 per card).

Not too bad, I have been putting a bunch of our Yahoo ads on Visa, no longer!

Ask.com Exits the Search Engine Space

I guess you don't have to worry about running PPC search ads on ASK.com anymore.  CNN is reporting that ASK.com will no longer be a search engine, and will instead focus on women looking for help managing their lives with a focus on finding answers to the basic questions about recipes, hobbies, children's homework, entertainment and health.

That had to be a hard decision for Barry Diller of InterActiveCorp who bought Ask and its affiliated Web sites for $2.3 billion in 2005.  That will be quite the write-off after spending so much on improving the search engine and buying TV ads to promote it.

Farewell ASk.com, farewell Ask Monkeys:

Will this be a trend in the search engine space?

Part of me still feels like this is some kind of hoax story that got picked up by CNN. Tony first told me about this story the other day from this site, and I didn't believe him.  The Ask.com site still looks like a Search engine to me.  Stay Tuned...