Advertising

The Microsoft/Yahoo PPC alliance was always going to have teething troubles and give advertisers some headaches. We are gradually learning just where those are going to come from.

The most complicated issues are likely to spring from the differences in the way that Yahoo Search Marketing and Microsoft's adCenter treat keywords. adCenter in general provides much finer control over management of keyword mis-spellings and plurals, significantly greater limits on negative keywords, as well as taking a different approach to geo-targeting.

The winners in the online marketing space have always been the fast movers. Quick and agile people who see an opportunity and have the motivation and resources to act rapidly. But as we’re seeing in the mobile marketplace right now, new opportunities are being fenced in by the biggest companies who control the platforms. In the evolving world of online advertising, the big beasts are making their presence felt.

Consider three data points:

The CPA network space is in tumult. If your favorite CPA network isn’t dead already, it’s probably refinancing, merging or crouching in a defensive posture.

Facebook made a big change in their advertising policies this week.

But they did it very quietly with a letter to display advertisers telling them that if you want Facebook traffic, you’d better be buying CPC.

The letter, sent out at the end of last week, told CPM advertisers that henceforth they, “will continue to receive impressions but may receive less clicks.”

And, “if your most important objective is to drive clicks on your ads, you should change your bids from CPM to CPC.”

Twitter has made its move towards monetization and there are big opportunities for performance advertisers as a result..

In the last 48 hours they have announced a new performance advertising platform, new targeting capabilities via geo-location, and that Twitter now has 105 million registered users with 75% of traffic coming from outside Twitter.com.