Search, Marketing and Whatever

The Back Story

The two internet behemoths Google and eBay have been at odds recently over the issue of payment services. Google has launched Google Checkout to allow consumers to pay for items and services online which is a natural competitor to PayPal owned by eBay. Thus far Google Checkout has not been a rousing success made all the more clear by the fact that eBay has refused to accept Google Checkout to pay for their auctions. In an uncustomarily blunt move Google decided to nudge it’s advertising client into changing it’s mind by announcing a “Google Checkout Freedom Party” at the same time and location as eBay’s “live” event a conference for eBay merchants. The plan: to entice upset eBay merchants to protest eBay’s decision on Google Checkout.

The Reaction
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In a recent WebmasterWorld forum thread a group of Adwords advertisers discussed the recent update to the Quality Score system that has been rolling out over the last year. Quality Score is Google’s name for their system of judging the value of a particular advertiser’s ad and landing page in conjunction with the keyword they are bidding on. The theory is fairly simple. Advertisers that don’t offer a good experience for Google Search user’s will have to pay more to advertise there. If you want to bid on the keyword “soccer cleats” but your landing page only has baseball cleats on it then you are offering Google’s user a bad ad clicking experience, they didn’t get the information or product they were looking for. Or if when the user attempts to buy soccer cleats on your site they are taken to a merchant website to complete the purchase rather than on your site that is also considered a bad experience by Google. Afterall, the user could have gone directly to the merchant rather than taking extra time (and clicks) to get there.
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This is the second installment of “Tide Marketing” based on observations I made from a Tide to Go pen that found it’s way home with me. The first part of the story can be found here: Tide Marketing Part 1

Looking over the Tide to Go pen I was amazed to see plainly placed near the instructions on the package these words, “Works well on these stains - tea, wine, grape juice, …” followed by “Does not work well on - grease, blood, ink”.

Truth in advertising, do people really do that? Apparently Tide does and I have to say I was really struck by it.
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Since I was just talking about conferences I might as well mention the press release that announced WebmasterWorld and SEO Class will be teaming up to produce a series of two day conferences.

SEO Class is a group of very bright SEO’s and SEM’s several of whom I have gotten to know over the last few years. I first heard of their partnership several months ago and I wasn’t surprised to hear that their inagural event (which took place last month) was very well recieved. Teaming with WebmasterWorld seems a no brainer as it will allow them that much more visibility through the WebmasterWorld forum and PubCon conferences.
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Yesterday a buddy and I took a blitz trip up to Seattle to take in the networking functions at SMX Advanced in Seattle.  Due to family commitments (Soccer game on Sunday and daughter’s band concert on Tuesday) I couldn’t make it for the entire conference but given that I live four and a half hours from Seattle it seemed rude not to drop by and see some friends who were among the attendees, exhibitors and speakers. 
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There was a knock at the office door today which is pretty unusual.  You see, I don’t get walk in traffic since my office is in a converted apartment attached to my house so someone was lost or…nope, it’s a package!  I didn’t remember ordering anything recently so I couldn’t imagine what was inside until I saw the bright Google letters on the side of the fridge box as I pulled it out of the packing box it had come in.  Woo Hoo - I’ve been waiting for this!
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There is always something to learn no matter where you are or what you are doing. 

It’s the type of annoying statement your mother would make but unfortunately many times your mother was right.  (My mother doesn’t read this blog or else I couldn’t admit that.)  I went to the store last night to pick up a few last minute things for the week.  While I was there I also purchased a “Tide to Go” pen which had not been on my list.  The Tide pen ended up being left on the kitchen table overnight so while I was eating lunch today I looked over my spur of the moment purchase and realized I had a bonafied 3 part marketing series staring me in the face. Without further ado here is the first installment of “Tide Wisdom”. 

Warning - Tide Wisdom is not cutting edge marketing information as much as a reminder of things we often forget to take advantage of.  If you’re the owner of a top tier ecommerce site this won’t be big news - but it’s money left on the screen (so to speak) by a lot of smaller websites.

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When I was in college I worked the last two years for the school in the “Admissions & Marketing” office.  As you would suspect from the name it was focused on bringing students to the college and the work seemed easy to me since I liked to talk and was reasonably good at it.  About 9 months before I graduated the Vice President for that department asked me to consider working as a full time employee, an offer that I accepted.  Two things immediately happened:

1. I began furiously searching the college bulletin trying figure out how to graduate as quickly as possible regardless what my degree would be in - hehe.
2. I was graced with a 3′X6′ table set into a corner with an uncomfortable “task” chair and my own phone.  I thought I had hit the big time, for the first time in my life I didn’t have to hunt for someone else’s empty desk to steal for an hour or two.

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I was just talking with cshel on IM about her recent blog post “How well does the Google algo catch spamdexers?” which is quickly gaining popularity over at digg.  Ironically, late last night I found a similar instance of this type of behavior (though not as aggressive) but I was too tired to blog about it and it wasn’t until I read cshel’s article that I even remembered.  (In a “nut-cshell” a company uses hundreds, even thousands of domain names with duplicate content to point a large number of links to their main website - Traffic Power comes to mind.)
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So the kids and I had so much fun that the wife decided that we would all do it again the next day.  Just because she didn’t get up early on Friday (like I did since I’m such a good parent) she decides to punish me with another 6:00 am morning.  I’m actually glad she did as this was a completely different experience than the day before.  As I mentioned in the previous post the Friday morning launch was just two balloons at a nearby school.  Balloons were launched at schools all over town making it a truly city-wide experience.  On Saturday all of the hot air balloons were in one location meaning that we got to see 40 balloons lanuch from one field over the course of an hour!  It was really something to see!  It’s late and I’m off to bed soon but I’ll share a couple of photos so you can get an idea of what it was like.

This is the sight that greeted us when we arrived!

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