Google Ad Innovations was launched at the end of March as a lab for ad products it is considering. It’s designed to help AdWords account holders experiment with ad technologies and get their feedback about the new products. They may or may not be released for real in the future, depending on how they test out among AdWords users.

Search Funnels was launched a couple of weeks ago. It slices and dices your search, conversion, keyword, and number of steps preceding conversions so you can figure out which ads are getting the most conversions and why. It’s actually pretty complicated, but there’s a video at the official AdWords Blog that gives you a good overview.

Google has long been known for text-based CPC ads, but have been busy coming up with ad models based on these text ads. The new ad models are product listing ads, comparison ads, and ad extensions, which consist of sitelinks, product extensions, video extensions, location extensions, multiple addresses for location extensions, and click to call phone extensions. Let’s go through each of these.

Product Listing Ads are in limited beta release right now. They include more product info, like images, prices, and merchant names without requiring additional keywords or text. So when someone enters a search query relevant to something in your Google Merchant Center account, Google may or may not show the most relevant products with the associated price, product name, and image. These are only charged on a cost per action (CPA) basis, so you only have to pay when someone actually buys something from your site.

Comparison Ads are also in limited beta release. These let users compare several relevant offers and work on a cost per lead format. With these, the users do not have to fill in forms, and Comparison Ads doesn’t send advertisers any kind of personally identifiable user stats. Right now this is being used for the credit card and mortgage loan industries in select locations. Comparison ads should let advertisers target offers more accurately in order to get more leads.

The suite of Ad Extensions lets users make ads more relevant and more useful. They expand on the concept of standard text ads, letting viewers have the option of getting additional information right in the ad without leaving the search page. These extensions work with existing text ads without requiring changes to bids, ad text, or keywords. Following are the types of Ad Extensions offered.

Ad Sitelinks lets advertisers extend the possibilities for existing AdWords ads, providing links to specific content deeper within your site’s sitemap. So rather than sending all users to the same landing page, Ad Sitelinks will offer up to four more destination URLs for potential customers to choose from. You can use ad sitelinks to direct visitors to specific parts of your site, such as promotions, store locators, and gift registries. Early users have reported improvements in clickthrough rates of up to 30%.

Product Extensions are in limited release and allow you to add more to your existing AdWords ads with specific product information on the merchandise you sell. It uses your existing Google Merchant Center account to highlight products relevant to the user’s query. They can also show pictures, titles, and prices of products. In the first screen shot, you’ll see the “plus box” under the ad indicating the product extension. When a user clicks on that plus box, lots of products, along with thumbnail pictures show up, as you can see in the second screen shot. You’re charged the same CPC whether the user clicks on your main text ad or any offers in the product extensions box. But if a user  simply expands the box without clicking through to the site, you’re not charged.

Video Extensions are in limited beta release and allow you to engage prospective customers with video content. The video extensions are in an expandable plus box under the standard text ad. If the user watches the ad for 10 seconds or more, you’re charged based on your maximum cost per click bid of your text ad. After vieing the video, the user can click the URL link in the ad or go directly to your site with no extra charge to you. These are great for movie trailers and product usage instructions.

Location Extensions attach your business address to your ads. Your ad can also contain your business’s name, phone number, and address, promoting your business and its products and services with a specific location that’s of interest to the user. It’s good for drawing in local customers.

Multiple Addresses for Location Extensions, also in limited beta release displays a plus box under ads at the top of the page. Whenever a user clicks on that plus box, he or she sees a map that shows store locations near them, plus a search box for moving the map around. This feature shows as many stores as are relevant to a given search, increasing the chance of picking up local customers.

Click to Call Phone Extensions are for people searching for products and / or services from their smart mobile phone (like the iPhone, Android, or Palm Pre). This feature has been fully released. If someone finds your business on a search and would rather call you than visit your website, they can use a click to call phone extension they’ve found in ads on their mobile devices that have full internet browsing capability. You’re charged the same for a customer’s call as you would had they clicked on your website.

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1. Google Quality Scores in Adwords
2. Higher Clickthrough Rates On Your Google Adwords Campaigns.
3. Profit From Google Local by Targeting Leads in Your Area

Paying for irrelevant clicks in your pay per click (PPC) ad campaign is frustrating, but is there anything you can do to minimize the chances of this happening? Yes, in fact. Three of the biggies are the use of negative keywords, exact match, phrase match, and broad match.

Negative Keywords

Negative keywords have a major impact on your click-through rate (CTR) and therefore, your campaign’s return on investment (ROI). When you use the “phrase match” and “broad match” options setting up your AdWords campaigns, you should include negative keywords as well. It’s easy to do. Go to your AdWords account and click on the “Keywords” tab. You have the option of adding new keywords, as you can see in the screen shot. Notice at the bottom of the screen shot, how you can designate keywords as:

• negative keywords – don’t match this term: -keyword
• exact match – match exact term only: [keyword]
• phrase match – match exact phrase: “keyword phrase”
• broad match: keyword

Setting up negative keywords by placing a minus sign in front of them lets you filter out identical terms that can have very different meanings. For example, suppose you sell photographs of foxes (Work with me here, OK?). Well, if someone searches on fox photos thinking they’re going to get pictures from The Simpsons on Fox television network, you’ll be paying for their irrelevant clicks. Therefore, you want to use negative keywords like “television” and “network” to limit the number of times an ad for your photographs of foxes appears on a page when someone wants pictures from the TV network.

Judicious use of negative keywords can help improve the quality score of your keywords. A number of factors influence your keywords’ quality scores, including its general performance. Bottom line: a higher quality score makes your keyword trigger ads at a lower cost per click and positioned higher. Your CTR is the most important aspect of your quality score. A lot of “accidental” clicks on your ads can lower your click through rate. By using negative keywords, you’ll have fewer ad impressions, but fewer “false positive” clicks on your ads.

Finding the right negative keywords is a very important parts of a PPC campaign, but it can be complicated. One way to select negative keywords is to use your regular keyword research. The Google Keyword Tool will show you the keyword phrases that are more relevant and less relevant to your products and services. But relevance doesn’t always mean they match the searcher’s intent, and that’s what negative keywords help you with.

You’re not charged for negative keywords, and there isn’t a penalty for having a long list of negative keywords, so it’s worth your while to do some hard core keyword research and compile a list of negative keywords. You can have up to 10,000 negative keywords per campaign, so you’re not likely to use them all up. (Yahoo lets you have 250 negative key words and phrases, and Microsoft AdCenter limits you to 1024 characters worth of negative key words and phrases.)

Google’s Keyword Tool isn’t the only place that can help you come up with negative keywords. You can use server log files to find info on queries that lead people to your site. Heck, you can even use a thesaurus if that helps. Sometimes common sense helps you think up good negative keywords. Suppose, for example, your products and / or services are only available in certain geographic areas. You can use names of places your stuff isn’t available as negative keywords. For example, if you paint houses in Portland Maine, you don’t want to be paying for the clicks you might get from people in Portland, Oregon. Therefore, you can use “Oregon” as a negative keyword to keep out some irrelevant clicks. So the takeaway from this is that even though negative keywords will cause you to have fewer ad impressions, the CTR and quality score will go up, and so will your return on investment.

Exact Match

It’s exactly what it sounds like. If you want your ad to show up when someone searches on “baseball caps” but not on just baseball or just caps, then you specify your keyword in brackets when you choose your AdWords keywords: [baseball caps]

If you choose [baseball caps], your ads might show up when someone searches for baseball caps, but it will not show on searches like “baseball cap,” “blue baseball caps,” or “buy baseball caps.” Now, while this will cut down on the number of ad impressions, clicks, and conversions, those clicks you do get will likely be highly targeted toward your service.

Phrase Match

Suppose that you chose “baseball caps” as one of your keyword phrases for your ad campaign. Your ad is eligible to show up on searches such as “buy baseball caps,” “baseball caps giveaway,” or “green baseball caps.” They will not show up on searches like “caps for baseball,” “baseball cap,” or “baseball hats.”

This is a more targeted approach than a plain broad match, but it’s more flexible than exact match ([baseball caps]).

Broad Match

Broad match is the default option. If you used the phrase baseball caps with no bracketing, no quotation marks, no negative sign, your ad could show up on searches for “baseball,” “caps,” “baseball hats,” or “caps for baseball.” You’ll get more click throughs, but you’ll get more erroneous click throughs as well. Now it’s possible that someone will be searching the term “baseball” wanting to find certain statistics, click on your ad, and be smitten with it enough to buy one of your baseball caps.

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1. Search Engine Advertising & Keyword Matching
2. Higher Clickthrough Rates On Your Google Adwords Campaigns.
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Guest Post by Alan K'necht

Over the past five to eight years, Search Engine Marketing (“SEM”) professionals have finally woken up to the reality that the goal of their campaigns, be it search engine optimization (“SEO”), pay per click (“ppc”) like Google Adwords or any other effort is not about driving the maximum number of eyeballs to a web site; it’s about conversions. Yes, the goal must be to drive quality traffic that converts on the site.

With the advances in web analytic products like WebTrends, SiteCatalyst and Google Analytics (just to name a few of the more popular tools); the ability to assign conversions to specific marketing efforts has improved immensely and allow a the Search Engine Marketer and more importantly their clients the ability to properly evaluate their efforts. Through this effort campaigns can be more effectively optimized to maximize the return on the investments (“ROI”).

Yet one question that most organizations get wrong is “What is a conversion?”. Many organization understand that when it comes to an e-commerce site on-line sales are a conversion, other sites where the goals may be subscription registrations or trial downloads understand and know how to track these as conversions. Yet websites may have many more possible conversion points, some of which are easier to measure than others.

The hardest ones to measure are off-line conversions. These are conversions that happen not on the website itself, but through a different commerce channel. How do you account for the person who came to your site, poked around found what they wanted at a price they wanted to pay, but instead of buying it online stopped at a retail outlet on their way home from work to purchase it? Do you give the SEM campaign credit for a portion of in-store sales? Most organizations do not, despite their very real impact.

What do you do when the customer calls a number on the website to place the order over the phone? How do you measure or account for a customer’s call during a website visit about a specific question that leads them to completing their purchase on-line? If you didn’t answer the call or didn’t answer their question properly the customer may have not completed their purchase.

For companies dealing with the issue of call attribution there are now products on the market that provide call tracking information and even allow attribution to specific marketing events including SEO and PPC right down to specific keywords. What is missing from most of these call tracking analytics tools is the ability to integrate them into your existing web analytics tool.

Mongoose Metrics, a firm providing call tracking solutions, has even taken on the issue of integrating call tracking analytics with existing web analytics tools. The first integration was completed early in November with the integration into WebTrends. They are currently finalizing the integration with Ominture Site Catalyst and Google Analytics which should be completed by the end of the year.

So what will this mean to you if you start to using the call tracking software from Mongoose and integrated into your web analytics tools? In a nutshell, it is everything. By integrating when the call takes place and attributing it to specific marketing campaigns, you will be able to see not only which campaigns are driving on-site conversions but which ones are generating phone calls. By evaluating the nature of these calls (listening to the recorded calls), you can find out typical questions or issues and then use this information to improve landing pages and/or web site content. One of my favorite things to do is a path analysis to and from the call. By evaluating the paths, I can determine if there is a reoccurring pattern in user behavior that must be addressed. Or perhaps I just want to see what happens after each call; do they simply leave the site, or do they continue on their journey and complete their on-site conversion.

Path Analysis to and From Call

One trick I like to do is to calculate an average value to each phone call and attribute this value to each call received as part of the revenue generated by different campaigns. This provides another comparison point which can be very valuable. To improve the accuracy of the value each phone call Mongoose has just developed a new feature that will let the operator (the person who answered the call) to input the value of the call so that you don’t have to use a fixed value. Of course the down side of this is that you must take the time to enter the value immediately after the call to avoid issues with data entering your web analytics stream out of sequence or not at all.

With a bit of advance configuration, during our tests, we were even able to report on calls generated through social media efforts. This included measuring the number of calls that came from links included in Twitter posts and Facebook status updates. Essentially the potentials for call tracking is limitless.

Call by Marketing Source

By comparing which keyword phrases generate calls, which marketing campaigns generate calls, the nature of calls by campaign and the overall value of these calls to specific marketing efforts, one major hurdle in tracking off-line conversions can be cleared. With this overall increase in viable conversion data in your web analytics tool you now have a more powerful reborn analytics tool which will give you a competitive advantage when implemented and interpreted correctly.

Alan K’necht is the President of K’nechtology Inc. a firm specializing in web analytics, SEO and PPC campaign management and frequent speaker at web marketing conferences throughout the world. Follow Alan on Twitter @aknecht

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Google announced this on the GAN blog today:

Affiliate publishers have new payment options through the integration with AdSense. As we head into the busy holiday season, please take a few minutes to check on the status of your payment preferences.

Publishers can view payments that have been posted to your AdSense account in the Google Affiliate Network platform; on the “Home” page click “Payments.” This view captures all payments and a detailed breakdown of your earnings per advertiser.

Payment information is stored in your AdSense account and Google lets you select your desired form of payment. Publishers can currently choose to be paid by electronic funds transfer, check, Western Union Quick Cash or Rapida. Check out the Help Center for a detailed overview your options.

Note if you see a message in your AdSense account prompting you to complete your payment information, it’s important you act quickly. This message means that there is some information missing in your payment profile and action is required to avoid payment delays.

Since Google integrated Adsense with Google Affiliate network there has been reports from a lot of users with difficulties in the transition, our recommendation is that you log into your account immediately and check for any system messages. If you have a problem, try emailing Google support first than try the GAN forum.

As you can see, there is a fair bit of user problems associated with the switch over in the forum. Hopefully Google will sort this out for their users soon.

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Our top tips to optimize your ecommerce for holiday seasons

The holiday shopping season is approaching and you’ve worked hard this year to improve the SEO of your website. Now its getting to the busiest month of the year and you are checking your web stats everyday to see if sales and traffic are increasing.

You’re thinking to yourself, what can I do in the next few weeks to generate more sales? Clearly its too late to make any drastic changes to the SEO campaign? And you would be right, what follows are some simple tips you can implement today to capture more sales during the holiday season.

1. Be competitively priced.
Are your products competitively priced during this season? You should be checking your pricing against your competitors ( your customers will be ), more than likely they will be offering discounts. The easiest way to get the sale is to offer cheaper products. If you can not match your competitor’s pricing, than make sure you can offer something else to close the sale. ( keep reading )

2. Offer special services.
Discounts are great, but sometimes good old fashion service can seal the deal with your shoppers. Offering gift wrapping, gift cards or simply a follow up call ( from a real person ) after the order is placed can get you the extra sales this holiday.

3. Bet on referrals
People like to share their good ( or bad ) experiences and a great way to generate extra sales during the next month is to ask your customers to refer you, this is dead simple but often overlooked. You can do this by placing a ‘tell a friend’ feature at the last stage of the checkout or by including a message in the order confirmation email.

4. Update your website
Still have the same homepage from last Christmas? Now is the time to start updating your website with holiday season specials / designs if you have not done so. But be careful not to make your website look like a over decorated Christmas tree! Limit your changes to no more than 3 spots per page and keep the theme consistent. For example;

Website header image / banner

Website logo

Homepage Specials / Banners

5. Create top lists for the holiday season
Lists can be great linkbait and viral material, this year put a dollar spin to it for shoppers suffering from the economic crisis; setup a dedicated landing page for lists such as:

• Our top Christmas gift ideas under $50.00
• Top 10 gifts to give this holiday season
• Top Christmas gift ideas that won’t break the bank
• What Santa’s elves want this Christmas

Don’t over SEO this page, but rather treat this page as a piece to grab visual attention; use creative writing and if you can, put a funny spin on it. Don’t forget to give people the ability to share this page by social media.

6. Update your stocklist
Don’t get caught with your pants down, remove items that are out of stock or nearly out of stock from the top categories. There is nothing worst for a customer to order something for Christmas than finding out it’s going to take 2 months to be delivered. You can bet they will ask for a refund and tell all their friends about the horrible experience.

7. Clearly display your operating and delivery dates during the holidays
Same as above, shoppers want to know if their purchase will be received prior to the holidays. Make it clear to them when they will receive their goods, if you are offering special delivery services during these few weeks, this needs to be displayed on the website prior to the checkout stage, preferably on the product description page.

8. Check & optimize your pay per click ads
If you are running PPC ads such as Google Adwords, now is the time to go through your Ad copy and include some season specific messages. You can also create new ad blocks and link it to the top lists you created in Tip 5.

9. Observe religiously themed advertisements.
If your website appeals to an international market, be careful to observe and limit religiously themed ads and graphics. It may be the holiday season for everyone but it may not be a religious occasion for all. On the other hand, if your target audience does observe the holiday season religiously, than by all means target your promotions towards their religion.

10. Get organized this week!
Don’t wait until the last minute to contact your web designer or developer for updates and changes, give them plenty of notice and they will appreciate you for it. ( Who knows, they might even send you a card this year. )

Bonus Tips.

• Pay your web hosting bills – no website = no sales
• Check your payment gateway provider’s status – Some providers shut shop early or have shorter operating periods.
• Manage your staff’s hours – No one to pack your orders or answer phones? How will you survive these holidays?
• Optimize your website for speed – If your site has a lot of 3rd party add-ons, try disabling a few to speed up the browsing experience.
• Update your news / blog – No one likes to shop from neglected websites. Add something to your news / blog.
• Run through the checkout process yourself from another computer / browser - You might notice some bugs or copy that needs fixing.

We hope you have found these tips useful to get more sales this holiday season and please share these tips with people you think that might benefit.
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1. The 52 Top Search Engine Optimization Tips – Here Are 10 Of Them
2. Top Tips To Pay-Per-Click Search Engine Success
3. Ten Tips to the Top of Google

PPC Audit Guest Post by Steve Loszewski

Identifying Areas of Improvement

Popular pay per click programs include Google AdWords, Yahoo! Search Marketing (YSM), and Microsoft adCenter.  If you have accounts in these programs, you’re probably interested in improving them to increase (or achieve) profitability.  There are a number of ways to improve a pay per click account – what follows is a summary of some of the most common methods in identifying and improving elements of a campaign. Google AdWords is given heavy focus in this article, although many of the concepts can be applied to YSM and MSN as well.

Campaign Settings

For each campaign in your account, you should check the campaign settings.  These are some of the most important settings at the campaign level:

1. Budgets
2. Geo-targeting
3. Networks
4. Keywords
5. Bids
6. Ads and landing pages

1. Budgets

If your campaign shuts down early in the day, or has limited ad distribution because it is reaching budget-limitations, you can get more clicks and more conversions by lowering bids or raising your budget.  You can see if your campaign is reaching its daily budget by running reports inside the AdWords interface for previous days, or by seeing if Google has a warning that you may be missing out on clicks.  If you have accelerated ad delivery turned on, you want ads showing the entire day unless you think that conversion rates or conversion values are worth less later in the day.  Either way, the appropriate way to deal with this is by using ad scheduling to change bids by time of day – another, more advanced campaign setting.  If you are having your ads distributed evenly throughout the day (the default setting), you never want to be reaching your budget, since (presumably) it is profitable for you to have ads running in the first place.  Daily budgets are a device for limiting costs from fluke errors in your bids, settings, or other elements in your account.  They shouldn’t be used as a method to otherwise limit ad exposure.

2. Geo-Targeting

If different geographic locations have different conversion rates or competition, affecting the cost per conversion, they should be separated out into separate campaigns.   This allows you to set bids separately.  If different locales require different ad messages, you will also want to separate those locales into different campaigns. In addition you want to be sure you are not missing out on relevant visitors because your geo-targeting is too narrow.  For example, it sometimes makes sense for companies to target international visitors, although advertisers typically only start with targeting only the US.

You can see how your campaign performs by location by running a “Geographic Performance” report from the AdWords report center.  This report only aggregates data daily, so you’ll need to consolidate it into a pivot table to get totals for the entire period you run your report for.  If conversion rates or the cost per conversion is significantly different for a location then you will want to separate it into a different campaign.  Whether or not a conversion rate is “significantly different” can be a matter of common sense, but for more rigorous methods you might try a Student’s T-Test.

If you change the geo-targeting of a campaign, you want to be sure that you are aware of the effect it will have on how your ad is displayed.  Some targeting options cause a location to be displayed under your ad, and you may not want that to happen.

3. Networks

If you have campaigns opted into the content network, you probably want these in their own campaign.  The content network generally has different costs and, typically, lower conversion rates.  You should be setting bids and tracking performance on the Google Content Network separately from the Google Search Network.

Yahoo! Search Marketing, in particular, has spammy search partners, and a less reliable content network.  Run an “Ad Delivery” report from the “Reports” tab in YSM to find sites that are costing you money but are of poor quality.  These sites can be blocked in the “Blocked Domains” section, under the “Administration” tab.  Google also allows you to block poor quality sites.

4. Keywords

Keywords should be directly relevant to your products and services so that they convert well.  Organizing them in ad groups according to theme helps you repeat relevant keywords in the ad text and put visitors on the most relevant pages.  You might also organize them in ad groups according to performance so that you can reduce account management time by setting bids at the ad group level.  Poor performing keywords might be deleted or given narrower match types if other methods, such as writing more specific ad text or creating better landing pages do not help improve their profitability.

Besides switching Broad matched keywords to Phrase or Exact match, matching might be limited by adding negative keywords.  To find prospective negatives, run a “Search Query Report” from the AdWords report center to see if there are any irrelevant variations of your terms that are generating clicks.  You might also put your terms into the Google Keyword Tool to see if any irrelevant suggestions come up.  These should also be blocked.

You can add negative keywords at the campaign or ad group level. Negatives, themselves, can be given different match types.  Be sure you are not inadvertently blocking relevant queries for other ad groups with your campaign negative keywords; this is a common mistake.  Besides blocking irrelevant queries altogether, negative keywords can be used to control the ad group that shows an ad.  Broad matching sometimes leads to unexpected results.  Take a look at some of your ads in Google’s Ad Preview tool.  If you notice some queries are triggering the wrong ads, you might get the right ad to show by using ad group negative keywords.

5. Bids

The key to good bidding is knowing the value of a keyword.  It is sometimes difficult to gauge how much revenue a keyword might provide your company.  Before adjusting bids, you should have measurable goals and a target cost per conversion.  From there, run reports and adjust bids according to those goals.

6. Ads and Landing Pages

For your most important keywords, study the ads that show when you do a search inside Google’s Ad Preview tool.  Make sure your ads are compelling and accurate.  With optimized ad rotation, you can circulate multiple ads at once, and Google will circulate the best ads more frequently, based on click-through rates and quality scores.  Also make sure that your ad and landing pages fulfill visitor expectations.  Ads and landing pages should be goal oriented.  You can test different landing pages using Google’s free Website Optimizer tool.  If you have destination URLs set at the keyword level you will want to pay close attention to these to make sure they are accurate and updated.  Settings at the keyword level are easy to overlook and forget about, making for some unexpected surprises.

When Your Account is Optimized

This is an incomplete guide – an experienced internet marketing company will have plenty more tips, especially for optimizing bids, landing pages, and ads.  But this guide might help you make some very big improvements to your account.

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This is a Li’l Engine guest post by Steve Loszewski of Purevisibility.com an internet marketing company that can help you audit and optimize your Pay Per Click campaigns by Google AdWords Certified Professionals.

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FTC announces guidelines for disclosures

What has got every internet marketer up in arms this week? If you have not heard, the FTC ( Federal Trade Commission, USA ) has released its final guidelines for advertisements using endorsements and testimonials.

In its press release on the FTC blog, the commission released two PDFS titled;

Guides Concerning the Use of : Endorsements and Testimonials in Advertising – PDF

Revised Endorsement and Testimonial Guides – PDF

A combined behemoth of 94 pages, most of which is filled with legal jargon ( Hint – skip to the end of the first PDF and the second PDF, it has some easier to read scenarios and examples of what the FTC classifies as an endorsement etc ) .

While this author has not attempted to completely analysis the guidelines, which is a task too daunting at 3:31am, I have managed to find some great resources for our readers, that should help explain and clarify the report and its impacts.

Update: There is a great interview by Jim Edwards of igottatellyou.com with Mr. Rich Cleland, Assistant Deputy at The Federal Trade Commission that really clearifies a great deal of misconceptions of the new FTC guidelines. Thank you to @smbusinesscoach for the twitter update.

There is little doubt these new guidelines will impact most internet marketeers, but to what extent is still anyone’s guess and I am sure we will see some heated debates on the world wide web regarding this in the coming weeks.

It is my very early opinion that these guideline will become a standard practice such as privacy statements and terms & conditions of use. I also foresee the FTC will soon release a consumers guide or a layman’s guide to their guidelines which should help clear things up even more.

Some early reactions from internet marketers include ;

Imagine if government employees had to provide disclosure?  Can you see the laws with an *next to them *this law was paid for by the following lobbyists….

The following congressman went on long vacations compliments of the following companies…

If you have ever doubted the power Google holds today, look no further than this new law, this is exactly what Google wanted. No longer are paid posts against the Google webmaster guidelines, it is now against the law in the United States of America.

The interesting part about this is, that as long as your website is hosted outside of the US this law does not apply to you, and is unenforceable (I assume). Therefore one would think the indexing and ranking of websites that clearly are breaking this law could fall on the search engines displaying this content?

This is quite a massive move in the wrong direction by our government; one would think that our policy makers had better things to do with their time. How is possible that the US government is going to police this? How can they confirm that a disclosure is indeed required? Maybe lots of people like to blog about lots of various topics with lots of out going text links?

Since this would only apply to US based websites, I guess Google is going to place additional value on US hosted domains out going text links? Is Google going to devalue links from all other countries?

John Wieber -  SEOMoves.org

The team at Li’l Engine will post updates as they come in hand regarding the new FTC guidelines, for now I do think it is still too early to tell, but we hope the following resources will help you get a better grip on things.

• The Offical FTC Press Release
• Google Affiliate Blog Network
• Matt Cutts Blog – Some good comments
• Trademark Blog – Michael Gray & Ted Murphy on FTC Blog Regulations ( with recorded voice conference audio )
• PMA Blog – FTC Advertising Guidelines – Analysis ( PDF )
• disclosurepolicy.org – online disclosure policy generator

Have your own take on the new FTC guidelines? Please share them in the comments with our readers.

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Next time you perform a search in Google, note how many results appear on page one?

Out of millions of hits there are only 10 results on page one. as research indicates 89% will click page 1 results. and 4% on page 2, 6% page 3.

In the world of Search Engine Optimization competitor research plays a very important part to a successful campaign. By knowing who is on the top 10 result, and digging deeper to find out how they achieved this, you will be able to budget and plan your campaign. To be on page 1, you have to beat the other 10 results.

In the world of online business, knowing your competition is the key to success. From knowing who your top competitors are, why they are at the top and finding out when a new competitor appears will help your business grow and prosper.

Knowledge is power, here are some great tools I use on a daily basis to help my clients and to spy on my competitors. I will be covering each tool in separate posts to keep reading at a minimum.

Case Scenario

My company ( Clear-A-Face ) sales a fast acting acne removal cream, recently a new competitor ( Super Clear-A-Face ) has launched a similar product claiming to remove acne twice as fast. Been a smart business man, I want to know what this new competitor is up to and how they are marketing the product.

Google Alerts

Imagine if you had a personal assistant that was scouring the internet for information about your competitors 24hrs a day, 7 days a week. No overtime pay, no holiday leave and best of all , they work for free and deliver their research to you without fail, everyday.

Google Alerts

This is Google Alerts. A free service provided by Google which delivers to you in the latest customised topics from ;

• Google News
• Blogs
• Web Search results ( new SERPs )
• Videos
• Google Groups

Use this great tool to gather intelligence about your competitors products, their online marketing efforts and the markets interests on your competitors products. There are of course many other websites that offer a similar service, but to be able to see the news from Google’s eyes is great for SEO.

Using Google alerts I can setup as many campaigns based on keywords related to my competition.

• Campaign A for their brand name Super-Clear-A-Face.
• Campaign B for product related keywords : Acne Cream, acne treatment cream, pimple removal cream, acne gel.
• Campaign C for treatment , symptoms related keywords : Acne treatment, rid acne, cure acne, acne medication

Google News alerts will let me know if my competitor appears on major news networks or official press releases

Google Blogs alerts for possible product reviews by their customers, or any new competitors on the scene.

Google web search alerts to inform me of their SEO / online marketing efforts. I will see when their new website has appeared in Google’s index, any new pages they may have added, websites selling their products, websites possibly been used for link building purposes and research websites / forums dealing with acne.

I can also find out what products are gaining popularity by following discussions and forums found in my alerts.

You can really build a great overview of your competitor’s SEO and marketing strategy, the markets interests and awareness in your competitors products. Any interesting alerts should be bookmarked and filed for reference. After a few weeks you should have enough data to make a calculated decision whether this competitor poses a serious threat.

If you are reading this, stop. Click here and setup a Google alert campaign for your own keywords. Currently I have Google alerts tracking keywords such as SEO, SEM, search engine optimization, search engine marketing, Google Caffeine, Caffeine, Goobinghoo, lil engine, li’l engine, little engine.

I really can’t stress how useful this tool is, if you are already a Google Alerts user let us know how you have benefited.

As always if you have any questions feel free to post them in the comments section, or discuss it on our forum. Please pass on this article if you found it to be useful. ( http://bit.ly/Gripp )

In the next few posts I will be introducing competitor research tools like Google Ad Planner, Real-time search monitoring and link analysis, keyword scraping tools.

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Related posts:

1. Competitor Research using bit.ly – not just a URL shortener
2. SEM (Search Engine Marketing) – Research Measures Success
3. When Should You Do Market Research?

Let’s review the list of currently supported languages, which has grown considerably over the last few years:

Arabic
Bulgarian
Chinese (simplified)
Chinese (traditional)
Croatian
Czech
Danish
Dutch
English
Finnish
French
Greek
German
Hebrew
Hungarian
Italian
Japanese
Korean
Norwegian
Polish
Portuguese
Romanian
Russian
Serbian
Slovak
Spanish
Swedish
Thai
Turkish

If your native language doesn’t appear on this list and you’d like to Google to do something about it, just head on over and post your thoughts on the Adsense Help Forum.

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Related posts:

1. Google AdSense Rewards Content With Advertising Revenue
2. 3 Useful AdSense Plugins for WordPress
3. AdSense for Search Optimization Tips

They recently featured a site called CoolChaser, which is the go-to site for creating personalized MySpace themes. Founder Chao Lam and developer Sachiko Kwan thought about optimizing CoolChaser’s search feature and not surprisingly, ended up with Google.

They came up with the billiant idea of placing the search box top and center on the site’s header, where it sits prominently next to the their logo. Another thing they did was to put another search box at the bottom part of every page. The logic is that after people read the content of the current page, they may find the content lacking and want to search for other pages.

Here’s what CoolChaser looks like:

Last tweak they did was to replace the ad borders’ color with a lighter shade in the the search results page. The effect is that the ads blend better with the site’s other content, so it’s not jarring to look at them. All these changes were pretty simple and can be done in just a few minutes, but from their results so far, the impact is just amazing. First, their daily search queries increased by 40%, and second, site earnings grew by over 100%. Now that’s an improvement (and I sense a lot of people will be running off to edit their blog templates after reading this).

How about your site? Have you had any success with AdSense for Search?

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Related posts:

1. AdSense for Search Optimization Tips
2. 3 Useful AdSense Plugins for WordPress
3. Thai now supported in Adsense for Content