search marketing blog: ambergreen

The internet has become more popular than gardening or DIY for pensioners according to new research by AXA insurance group.

The UK’s pensioners now spend an average of 6 hours per week online, much of which is devoted to keeping in touch with family and friends – 88% chat regularly with friends and family online. Emailing and searching are the most popular activities, while 4 in 10 pensioners shop online.

These figures put the UK’s pensioners way ahead of their European neighbours who all spend much less time online than in the UK.

The research found that:

45% purchase travel tickets online

35% use online banking online

28% read online news

1 in 3 purchase CDs, DVDs or theatre tickets online

11% buy groceries online

showing that pensioners are beginning to avoid the high street and make use of the convenience internet shopping provides.

Soppy romantics all over the UK are expected to spend £1.32 billion on Valentines Day according to the British Retail Consortium.  

While men are more likely to buy gifts online, both sexes will spend an average of £95.80 on flowers, chocolates, jewellery and other gifts.  

Over 50% of the population are expected to splash out on Valentines Day, with 21 million roses being sent on the most romantic day of the year.

Creating a successful corporate blog that that increases brand visibility, customer insight and sales generation is a three step process according to a new report from Forester Research.

The study - The ROI of Blogging: The Why and How of External Blogging Accountability – was specifically developed to help companies understand the complexities of corporate blogs and how to ensure that your blog is successful in increasing brand visibility and generating customer response.

Forrester Research said that the most common benefits for corporate blogs were increased brand visibility, reduced impact from negative user-generated content, savings from customer insights and increased sales efficiency.

Google has added a link tool to their Webmaster suite which allows in-depth reporting of in-bound links to a site, giving webmaster and SEOs a more comprehensive links report than the link: operator does.

Of course it would be too much to expect Google to give us the actual data (they still need to protect their index from manipulation) but while the new links data shows only a fraction of the links they can track, it provides much more information than the link: operator.

Danny Sullivan at Search Engine Land has given a great overview of just how different the links data is with the new webmaster tool and what can be done with it, including exporting the backlinks in a CSV file.

ClickZ and Jupiter Research have launched their semi-annual survey to find out what goes on behind the doors of search marketers, finding out which strategies are the most popular, which tools are being used and where advertiser’s budget is being spent.

The survey is only 25 questions long and you could even win a $50 voucher from Amazon.com!

Yahoo! is taking the last step with its new Panama ad system today and releasing the new ‘Marketplace Design’ algorithm in the US, the biggest threat to Google’s stranglehold on advertising dollars ever seen.

While parts of Panama have gone live over the past few weeks, the new ranking algorithm will see the system move from a bid price ranking model to a system which takes bid, ad quality and other factors into account when determining where ads are ranked on results pages.

The new system is meant to give users more relevant ad results which sounds good.  However, the other reason behind the Panama project has been to increase monetization, which won’t sound so good to advertisers.  There are fears that while the new algorithm will increase ad quality, it will also force advertisers to overpay.

Advertisers aren’t used to a system which doesn’t rely on bid price only, so it won’t be a surprise if this stirs up some complaints.  In fact, in a New York Times article today Yahoo’s chief executive, Terry S. Semel isn’t resting on his laurels, saying: “It has been and continues to be our No. 1 company priority.”

Although Panama is US only at present, roll out to the UK is expected in the next few months, giving us time to sit back, watch the fall out and prepare the best we can in the meantime.

Search Engine Land’s Mona Elesseily has given us a great review of the technical aspects of the new algorithm including how historical clickthrough rates (CTRs), Expected CTRs, ad copy, bids, URLs and advertiser information are some of the major relevance factors considered in the new algorithm.

Poor Microsoft – they announce their eons-in-development new operating system and within days everyone is having a go at them.  Yesterday they were forced to admit that the voice recognition features in Vista could potentially be hijacked, making the computer tell itself to delete files.

While Vista is able to respond to voice commands, concerns had been raised about malicious intent being used to exploit users’ PCs.  Microsoft did admit that this was a “technically possible” but not to worry.  Um…I would have thought that potential new Vista buyers would have wanted a little more reassurance than that.

According to BBC News some Vista users have already tested the theory and were able to delete files and empty the trash can making documents irretrievable.

New figures from ClickForensics have shown that click fraud continued to rise in the last quarter of 2006, with the highest level all year being recorded.

The Click Fraud Index figures imply that the average click fraud rate was 14.2%, compared with 13.7%, 14.1% and 13.8% for the previous quarters respectively,

The report also found that the average click fraud rate of PPC ads appearing on content networks was 19.2% for Q4.

However, Google isn’t exactly in agreement, claiming that the actual click fraud rate is lower than 2%.

Shuman Ghosemajumder, business product manager for Trust & Safety at Google, hit back on his personal blog, saying that the data was: “not at all representative of the actual statistics of our network.”

Ghosemajumder points out problems in the ClickForensics methodology, saying that Google had found serious flaws in their counting process, and that the “source of this problem is incorrectly counting page views – from users browsing through an advertiser’s site – as clicks.”

I think we can leave them to fight it out…

Yahoo! has launched a new tool which allows webmaster to very quickly remove a URL from the index if necessary.  The Delete URL option, which is accessed via Yahoo! Explorer, not only deals with the removal of one URL, but also clears all associated subpaths.

Search Engine Land was lucky enough to spend some time with some of the Site Explorer team - Priyank Garg, Amit Kumar and Tim Mayer – who went over the Delete URL option and explained the differences between what the Delete URL function does in contrast to the usual robots.txt file and meta robots tag methods of keeping a page out of the index.

Danny Sullivan has posted an in depth explanation of how Delete URL works independently of the other two options; pages will continue to be crawled but similar to won’t get indexed.

Yahoo! has updated its Site Explorer tool, the application that allows you to explore all the links and web pages indexed by Yahoo! Search.

The update allows users to authenticate using meta tags and offers new Site Explorer badges which can be added to your site to show how many sites link to yours as far as Yahoo! is concerned.