By Robert Lockard

Search-engine giant Google is trying to buck the overall downward trend in Internet advertising sales by grabbing a bigger slice of the pie and by eating a little of TV’s pie, as well.

In my blog entry, “Google debuts ‘stock market’ for display ads,” I talked about Google’s attempt to make its new DoubleClick Ad Exchange successful. At the end I touched on Google’s attempts to grow beyond its core competency of search ads into the world of display ads. I’ll pick up where I left off.

According to the Wall Street Journal article, “Google Decides to Find Its Creative Side,” Google is trying to translate its ownership of YouTube and DoubleClick into a more dynamic advertising approach. Google is so well-known as the king of search ads that it might be difficult for it to break into Yahoo’s territory of creative display ads.

They’ve already created YouTube ad campaigns for J.C. Penney and Quaker Oats, but they saved their most innovative campaigns for Hewlett-Packard and Volvo. For those two companies, Google helped create YouTube ads and display ads featuring the latest updates (tweets) from Twitter.

Search engines are notoriously slow in catching up to social-media sites like Twitter and Facebook. You can read my insights into this topic in my eHarbor Blog entry, “Google can’t keep up with Twitter.” It’s a promising sign that Google is making this effort to use Twitter in its online-advertising services.

Google’s foray into YouTube might be the key to grabbing some of the TV industry’s advertising sales. In the United States, TV receives more ad revenue than any other medium. Google’s ad-sale growth has fallen from 56 percent in 2007 to 31 percent in 2008 down to 3 percent in the second quarter of 2009. It’s still growing, which is remarkable since we’re in the middle of a recession, but Google wants to stop the downward trend.

Can Google pull it off? They seem to be fighting a war on three fronts. They’re trying to hold on to search-ad dollars, which have fallen because of the recession, while also jumping into both display ads and TV-like ads. I won’t count them out because they might just have the resources and patience to do it. We’ll keep an eye on what happens.

This is a complete version of the eHarbor Blog post: “Google flexes its creative muscles.” The photo of the cat in the Coca-Cola box is from Flickr, and it is the copyright of Greencolander.

By Robert Lockard

In September, Google introduced a new way for its customers to buy and sell online display ads. It’s called the DoubleClick Ad Exchange and it allows Internet marketers to find a variety of Web pages to advertise on and quickly make a bid. This speeds up the process for both advertisers and publishers looking for ad revenue.

I heard about this development in a Wall Street Journal article, entitled “Google Unveils Market for Display Ads.”

Google has literally thousands of partner websites scattered across the Web that display its online ads. However, Google has never been very good at display advertising. It bought DoubleClick back in 2007 for $3.1 billion and has been trying to come up with a good way to jump into this part of the paid-search market. This appears to be its big move.

This isn’t the first online-advertising exchange service. Actually, other major search engines, like Microsoft, Yahoo and AOL have had them for some time, though none of them has been able to make them particularly big or useful, yet. Maybe Google will find a way to make this exchange service popular and profitable.

Google’s move comes with plenty of risks. What if few ad publishers and advertisers sign on to the service? Who would want to participate in a service that no one else is using? Internet marketers are looking for ways to reach the right audience in simpler ways.

Surprisingly, Google is far behind other search engines in the display-ad market. Google is definitely the king of PPC with about a 70-percent share of the industry’s total revenue, but it only received 1.3 percent of all display-ad views. Yahoo is actually the leader in display ads.

Apparently, Internet marketers who want to target a specific audience with simple Internet ads turn to Google. But if they want something more dynamic, appealing to customers’ emotions more than their intellect, they are more likely to turn to Yahoo or TV advertisements.

This is a complete version of the blog post on the eHarbor Blog: “Google tries to expand into new PPC forum.”

The photo of the fiery wok is from Flickr, and it is the copyright of liber.

By Alyssa Udall (@udallyss)

It is too often the case that when starting a paid search marketing campaign, people tend to lose sight of the main point.  What’s the main point, you ask?  To get people to click, right?  Wrong.

Yes, it’s true that Pay-Per-Click ads provide quality leads most of the time.  However, no matter how interested the “clicker” is in your products, services or niche, if your site is poorly designed or organized, your marketing would have been in vain.  There is no point marketing a site that is difficult to use, messy, or otherwise messed up!

Make sure that your PPC ads are really being effective by testing your site for usability, attractiveness, etc.  There are hundreds of free and low-cost tools for this purpose!

Here are some online tools to test the quality of your site:

1. Five Second Test: With this nifty tools, website owners can upload a screen-shot of their landing page which will then be viewed by users for five seconds.  There are two different versions of the service, one where the viewers view your photo, then list everything they can remember from it.  The second is a click test, where the viewers click on the areas they find most prominent or interesting.  This tool can really help you test how first-time viewers are seeing your landing page.  Then you can cater the page around those findings to make your ads more effective!

2.  Website Grader: Website Grader is a simple and effective website tester tool.  Once your site is entered in, Grader will measure your site’s marketing power through SEO statistics, traffic and marketing strategies.  Once finished, they will even give you tips to improve the areas where you may be lacking.  This is a great tool for those “less-expert” of us in the field of development and marketing.

3.  Google Analytics: Without fail, Google Analytics has proven to be one of the most powerful marketing research tools.  Easy enough for beginning users, but with tons of extras and plugins for experts, it suits most online marketing levels.  On top of all this, it’s free!

To capitalize on all of your internet marketing campaigns, use free tools like these to see how people are viewing your site.  This will greatly increase the productivity of your PPC ads, SEO strategies and social media marketing.

By Alyssa Udall (@udallyss)

September 8th, 2009

It’s finally here! Microsoft and Yahoo have reached a new deal which will allow Bing to power all Yahoo searches, while Yahoo focuses on producing content and other products. Now that Microsoft and Yahoo have finally reached a merger agreement, it would be helpful to explore the changes this partnership will make on SEO and Pay-Per-Click advertising.

With the new deal in place, Yahoo search will now be powered by Microsoft’s new Bing search technology. This situation changes the game for PPC in a few ways.

Here are some aspects of paid search you can expect to see change:

Even out the market share. For years, Google has accounted for over sixty percent of all search-engine queries. Now that one of Google’s competitors, Yahoo, has been eliminated, Bing has the opportunity to finally be competitive with them. While most PPC ads will be focused toward Google for the next few years, Bing has the chance to gain many new clients in the future.

Double the fun. For loyal Yahoo users who will continue to use their search engine, Bing will receive double the traffic. PPC ads in Bing will also be highly successful, as their content will now be displayed in the results for two prominent search engines. To sweeten the deal, these ads will also be shown in relative MSN content, boosting the overall exposure of all Bing’s PPC clients. However, the conglomerate Google will still rule this field for awhile to come.

Let the games begin. As Bing continues to grow, bids for PPC ads will become increasingly competitive. As Bing tends to have less strict regulations than Google on quality scores and other measures, utah online marketing it can be expected that PPC on Bing will definitely see a boom at the beginning of the merger deal. However, as Bing becomes more competitive with Google, they will most likely raise these regulations to become more like their rival and increase the quality of their results.

As we advance further into this development, it will be interesting to see how Bing grows and how Google reacts to the competition. As history has frequently shown us, competition tends to breed better products, services and customer satisfaction. There should be no exception with this search-engine duel!