search marketing blog: ambergreen

A new US report from Click Forensics has found that fraudulent clicks decreased slightly in the last quarter among top tier sites such as Google and Yahoo, while 3^rd tier sites have seen a more substantial rise from 20.3% to 23.2%.

With click fraud being one of the major issues of the year for search engines, Yahoo and Google have worked to drive down the instances of fraudulent clicks, teaming up with the IAB and small engines to form the Click Measurement Working Group. The group will establish guidelines for what constitutes real and fraudulent clicks, measure its prevalence and provide guidelines on fighting it.

While some advertisers have claimed that click fraud rates are as high as 30%, Google and Yahoo have always maintained otherwise, and at last it seems that they might be getting somewhere.

Fresh from his little catastrophe with Internet Explorer 7 Danny Sullivan has produced a great article on how the IE7 search box works, how you can change it and how both Google and Yahoo’s toolbars operate within it.

As you probably know IE7 has an integrated search box powered by MSN Search which Google obviously isn’t happy about, particularly given that Microsoft is attempting to sneak upgrades through to users who have automatic updates installed, as discussed in the Browser Wars: Internet Explorer 7 and Firefox Updates See The Light yesterday.

It is possible to choose an alternative search engine to MSN, and Danny takes this opportunity to talk through this process. While competitors are nervous, it is entirely possible that people will do what people often do, taking the easy and comfortable option, open the browser and go straight to their usual search provider. Time will tell.

Internet Explorer 7 is being rolled out in updates to from November 1st through the Windows update system, and worrying a securioty flaw has bene found already. Well that didnt take long did it? Security site Secunia has noted a issue with the redirection of URLs with the “mhtml:” handler and could be used to gain access to documents served from another site.

For those of you who like your search with a bit of a kinky twist (don’t we all?) there’s a new search engine on the scene – and she’s a hard task mistress and no mistake.   Microsoft has taken the idea of Jeeves and made search a damn sight easier on the eye with Ms Dewey, a cheeky avatar who talks to you through the search process and even gets you into trouble if you don’t work fast enough!

Visually this is an interesting search development, although the results don’t quite measure up.  Considering it’s powered by MSN Search, it’s a bit of a letdown and it’s only really novelty value that makes it worth visiting at the moment.  The cityscape takes up most of the page, and the actual results are given little room.

But who cares!  This is sexy search and that’s good enough for most of us!

Although contextual advertising invariably means Google AdSense to most people, a recent post at johnchow.com has a great list of other online advertising opportunities which although they might not be right up our street, is an interesting and comprehensive look at the ways of monetizing a site beside Google.

Just as Firefox is poised to launch the latest version of its open source browser, version 2.0, Microsoft has jumped in there and released IE 7, the first update to its browser in five years. strange to think that it has taken this long for a major update to take place given the pace that developments occur online these days, but the question is has it been worth the wait?

Well, not is Danny Sullivan’s recent experience is anything to go by; he spent hours trying to get his computer back to normal after either IE7 or its system updates killed his entire system. Not exactly a good first impression.

The new version of the Microsoft browser has seen the interface streamlined, anti-phising defences added, and a range of new tabs designed to compete with the growing popularity of the thorn in its side, the increasingly popular Firefox. Take a tour of the new system here.

One of the new features is an automatic RSS reader which sits on the toolbar. This could have important implications for clients still trailing their feet when it comes to pushing news out to customers, especially when you consider that Microsoft has taken the decision to push the update out to all users who have automatic updates enabled. Although they can reject the update and carry on using their current version, how many non-savvy users will?

In his blog Matt Cutts reviewed the new Firefox update, but was too scared to try out IE7 in light of Danny’s experience. By all accounts he was pretty pleased with the new version, and Robert Scoble has noticed that some sites seem to run a little slower on IE7, with Firefox being muchg faster than the Microosft browser. Only time and in house testing will tell.

If you leave the office and go home to spend yet more time online you might have a new disease discovered in the US. According to new research from Stanford University, more than one in eight adults are actually suffering from internet addiction characterised by a compulsive need to check emails, chat rooms and favourite sites.

Apparently a typical addict is male (I’m saying nothing..), single (quelle surprise), white college-educated male in his 30s, who spends more than 30 hours a week on “non-essential” computer use.

So essentially while the internet is fab, there is a sad, lonely subset of people out there who just can’t help themselves. I wonder how much money they spent finding that out. Genius.

Allurent, a US based expert in internet commerce has launched an Online Merchandising Survey which shows that 67% of consumers will abandon a purchase due to lack of product information, with 83% saying that they would be more likely to make a purchase if retailers added more interesting and innovative ways to buy.

While e-commerce sites have moved on a little in the past few years, many online shopping experiences are still flat, unhelpful and sometimes downright off putting. But as online shopping revenue grows, some studies are indicating that many consumers may actually turn to offline shopping for the experiences it provides, including the opportunity to understand products better.

While companies such as Gap have begun to provide a more rounded shopping experience, where the products on site actually look like the real thing, it’s an all too common experience to visit an e-commerce store only to find that products are almost impossible to see, colours distorted and ordering was difficult, if you actually get that far.

In researching this information I visited three of the UK’s top women’s fashion retailers (all in the name of work folks, all in the name of work) and found that only one site offered a zoom facility in order to look at the detail of an item, which didn’t work across not one, but several items. In addition I found empty product categories, products where none of the various offered sizes were available and nightmarish navigation.

Ensuring that consumers have a good experience on a site should be key to an e-commerce website, yet all too often usability fades in comparison to aesthetics. And given that users are actively turning to the high street due to these issues, maybe it is time for online shopping professionals to sit up and take notice.

The Allurent Online Merchandising Survey is available to read in the Library\E-commerce folder.

Yahoo’s next generation search advertising platform Panama has gone live in the US and over at SearchEngineWatch Barry Schwartz has kindly run through the system to show some of the highlights.

Panama has been long anticipated. The UK launch, previously expected in the Q3, won’t now be seen here until at least Q2 in 2007.

Panama has been designed to move Yahoo’s search advertising facilities into the campaign based approach taken by its rivals, specifically Google, who is often credited with being the innovator in the filed, when it was actually Yahoo! who started the PPC revolution.

The idea behind the new system is that advertisers will be able to build campaigns of multiple ads linked to multiple keywords, although the ranking system won’t change and those campaigns paying the most money per click will still come up tops first.

According to Barry Schwartz the new system offers a more user friendly interface, advanced geotargeting and increased flexibility.

Randfish at the SEOMoz blog has been busy again, this time reverse engineering the Google algorithm, something I know we all like to do in our spare time. He has come up with a rough formula which takes into account factors such as keyword usage, inbound links factors, domain strength and content quality to come up with a method that makes 4^th year algebra look easy peasy.

Obviously we can’t tell how accurate it is, but it’s a good stab at making the whole thing a little easier to grasp and remember.

Over at Google’s Webmaster Central Blog they are showing off a funky new webmaster tool, Googlebot Activity Reports, which shows exactly what the little blighter has been up to! Not only does it show the number of pages Googlebot has crawled from a site per day, but it also display the number of kilobytes of data it downloaded, as well as the average time it took, all over a 90 day period.

This information could be really useful, especially in cases where a site is not being adequately crawled, this gives a great visual representation of the issue to clients.

Google’s Webmaster Tools offers range of useful bits and pieces, such as the optional Google Image Labeler and the Sitemaps tab which shows the number of URLs Google has crawled from a submitted sitemap; if you don’t use any of these tools at present you’d be advised to take a look and see what’s available.