SEO/SEM, Organic Search, Paid Search, PPC

In today’s challenging business climate, any positive results that can be gained are encouraging, but it is often diffi cult to accurately measure success. Marketers face a bewildering array of potential success metrics, the defi nition of which is not always clear, let alone their impact on overall results. Because of the complexity often involved in assessing the true success of a campaign, marketers tend to look for answers where the looking is good, rather than digging deeper. Most of us have probably been guilty of this at some time.

Pay-per-call advertising has been growing rapidly over the last year or so, allowing advertisers and publishers to generate hot leads from potential customers who prefer to use the phone. Some industry insiders are already estimating that it will become a multi-billion dollar market, with companies like RingRevenue, KeyMetric, CallButton, ValueLeads and others extending the pay-per-call payment model into affiliate marketing.

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.

Yahoo has announced that the Yahoo! Publisher Network (YPN) will be closed down effective April 30, 2010. In a remarkable decision, Yahoo is suggesting that publishers move to Chitika, who have set up a customized process for YPN publishers. Yahoo says that all YPN publishers will be mailed final payments by May 31, 2010.

Last year Google ran no less than 17 different April Fool's Day hoaxes. I have always loved that a company that has so much on its plate takes the time to differentiate itself and build some positive brand equity by investing humor.