mThink

If you have ever wondered how the online goods you promote are handled on their way to the customer we have a slightly off-beat read for you. Mac McLelland spent time working at a huge warehouse shipping goods for online retailers. Sample quote:

Yandex, Russia’s biggest search engine has not only just signed a real-time search deal with Twitter but has also released its results for Q4-2011 showing over 50% growth in sales and profits year-on-year. Yandex’s share of Russian search now stands at 60.8% and they’re planning for more growth with an aggressive move into mobile.

For many offers the really big opportunities for affiliates lie overseas and Facebook is perhaps the simplest and most accessible way to buy targeted traffic in these markets. Nanigans is a company that provides Facebook ad campaign management and this week they launched a new infographic that draws from 175 billion ads impressions managed by them in 2011.

I’ve often found that Google’s AdWords Tool seems to provide surprisingly limited results in terms of discovering high volume search words and phrases but i’ve never been quite able to put my finger on what’s going wrong. Now I know.

Rand Fishkin brings us the wisdom: As you can see, there’s ~50% of the terms not shown in the suggestion list, which is fairly substantive and could lead to some serious missed targeting opportunities.

If you are being brave enough to run offers in China you may be interested in the Q4-2011 earnings posted today by Chinese search engine Baidu. Baidu is running fast to be the Google of China with 77% of the search market and a new smartphone launched with Dell.

Highlights of the results include operating profits up by 91.4% to $1.2 billion for 2011, on total revenues of $2.3 billion.

The one area of mobile in which Google is kicking Apple’s as$ is advertising. Forget about the Android operating system; mobile search and display is where the money is for Google in mobile right now.

In order to make the most of the opportunity, Google has now changed the way they’re selling their CPC ads, introducing an AdWords-style quality score to the auction process.

Is Yahoo planning on making a big new jump into affiliate marketing? A Wall St Journal report yesterday indicated that it just may be. New CEO Scott Thompson is apparently keen to find new revenue streams so that Yahoo is less dependent on its struggling display ad business. His approach? He "wants to push the Internet company away from its advertising roots and get more of its revenue from fees and commissions."

Two recent cases of AdSense publisher bans highlight publisher discontent about Google’s mysterious methods for determining when to ban…

Between December 2010 and December 2011, searches for “coupon” and “coupons” (broad matched) ballooned to over 63 million for a year-over-year increase of 37%.