In an announcement today on the official Google Adsense blog it was announced that they will be opening up and extending the Adsense feed for domains to all website publishers. This will allow anyone regardless of domain portfolio size to monetize thier domain inventory even for undeveloped domains. From the official posting:

“With AdSense for domains, users can find relevant information rather than see empty pages or “page not found” errors. Today we present ads, links, and search results on the pages, and may add other useful information in the future. To ensure positive user experience and the quality of our network, these sites are monitored for policy compliance and prohibited from using text and images designed to confuse users.”

In an interesting statement they actually say “ads on these pages convert well”. Is this Googles way of recognizing that some parked pages actually do convert users? It sounds that way to me. But for them to generalize it so much..well lets just say I dont totally agree with that. They may convert to a click ffor the publisher, but will it ultimatley convert to a sale for the advertiser? Thats the real question in my mind. SO in a war with the parking companies Google itself just became the biggest parking company of all. This is interesting to me for so many reasons. It seems they are trying to monopolize the very industry that they held in such low esteem for so long. Do No Evil? I continue to see this mantra turned on it’s nose with the passing years as Google speaks out of one side of it’s mouth saying Parking companies are bad they rip off advertisers and junk up the internet…while speaking out the otherside to say something like why dont we just shut all the competition down and become a parking company ourselves.

Whats next Google domain tasting? How about some domain kiting or warehousing? Just go ahead and snatch up t he expiring domains and push them out with your domainer ads on them. Are you also going to tweak your search algorythm to push certain domainers portfolios to the top? This would certainly increase your revenue would it not?

One domainer had this to say “I think there is a lot of upside here for everyone. Many of the parking companies are garbage anyway so those guys will probably have a lot of challenges ahead.

As for the quality parking companies I think this little shakeup is exactly what the industry needs to kick start development teams to provide better landing pages, customized features and anything to help domain owners build out parked sites.”

Is this the positive competition domain parking companies needed to get busy improving the products they offer? Or is this simply a first step towards the end of domain parking companies for the exception of Google.

Google will probably end up banning users, and tweaking rev shares and this alone may be enough to keep domainers with the high performing parking companies. Or maybe the domainers will actually show some loyalty and support for the very companies who helped them make all the money they have over the years, although i seriously doubt it.

On a positive note for parking companies it seems that so far domainers will not be able to customize, add graphics etc to the templates and pages offered by Google for Domains, and likely domainers will not be able to simply pick up the phone and get the same level of dedication and service that many parking companies offer to thier users. The only options so far seem to be picking the colors much like that of a basic adsense setup, but these options may expand as time goes on.

Only time will tell the impact this will have on the domaining industry and parking companies and Google themselves. We can only hope that 1. hundreds of people wont lose thier jobs over this 2.The internet wont become even more junked up than it is

Happy Holidays

An Update!

It appears that the feed is limited to content feed only not search. The only way thatyou get the search feed resultsis if you actually do a search. Let me know what your experiences are!

So your thinking off using a second tier search engine to drive some extra traffic to your site at a cheaper rate and get more conversions right…well kind of but before you jump into it and start bidding on hundred or thousands of keywords lets take a step back and think about a few things.

What Exactly Does 2nd Tier Mean?
Well a 2nd tier PPC provider has a smaller market share and generally less well known, but that doesn’t mean that they wont be effective. The 2nd tier search engines and PPC platforms drive billions of searches a month. The cost can vary, but its not uncommon to find clicks for a portion of the price of the major three aka Google, Yahoo (Formerly Overture) and MSN.

What Should You Look For?
Well you should first know what your goals are and what you expect to get from the PPC campaign. You wont see quite the same results from these 2nd tier guys as you do the big ones so keep that in mind. Each one can tend to have a different type of user that makes up the majority of the market share of searches done on that platform. For example eZanga has a lot of promotional driven and contest hungry users between the age of 18-25. Now that only represents a portion of their user base, however it would seem to be the biggest share. Also think about click fraud since sometimes the smaller search engines don’t have a good fraud system in place. I would suggest that you implement test campaigns for your market and demographic in a couple of the engines first then see how well it performs before you jump right in and pump up the budget.

Who Are These 2nd Tier Providers?
Well there are getting to be more and more, but I will tell you about the ones that I know of and have dealt with personally.

ABC Search

ABC Search offers click fraud and some pretty new data options for advertisers. Their site says they do over 2 billion searches a month. $25 dollar minimum deposit and a .05 cent minimum make them a good choice to compliment your PPC campaign with.

ASK.com

Looksmart

In a recent attempt to clean up the traffic and help the cpc and conversion of clients, yahoo among others have began to cut down drastically the ability to practice arbitrage with their feed. In an email I recieved a week or two ago from ParkingDots, they informed me that Yahoo would be closing the feed and they would be closing the business. What does this mean for other parking companies out there? Obviously they were unable to aquire an alternate top tier feed so how will this affect the industry leaders?  Heres the email for your reading pleasure!

Hello.  You were recently informed of the end of our Yahoo feed for your parked domains, and the subsequent contract we expected to sign with another Tier One feed provider.  Unfortunately, the arrangement with the alternate provider did not work out as we’d expected.  The consequence of this is that ParkingDots will be closing our doors effective this Sunday, March 9, 2008 at midnight.  All the domains you have pointed to us should be redirected immediately to an alternate parking company.  You might want to consider the following parking companies for your domains -

www.Parked.com

www.DomainSponsor.com

www.Fabulous.com

If we have not spoken to your personally today to explain the events unfolding, it is because we did not have a valid phone number in our system for you.  We apologize that we are only able to reach you via email.

Any monies owed you will be paid according to our normal payment schedule, approximately 45 days following months end.

Please feel free to contact me should you have any questions.

Barbara Reininger

Product Manager

It appears that .mobi has settled in the case of music.mobi. After a long brewing debate and absurd proposals from .mobi, they have finally given the antics a rest and handed the domain over to the auctions original domain winner. For more information about the .mobi story check out this link http://www.namepros.com/dot-mobi/403779-i-bid-611-000-music-mobi.html. Check this out and think twice before entering into an auction with sedo or even buying a .mobi. I think ICANN needs to regulate things a bit more closely. Does anyone think the .ASIA will be an even bigger scam….. I sure do. In the .mobi situation you had the ability to purchase names, but all premium names were to be auctioned off. So if you want jimmyshungryhouseofhamburgers.mobi no problem…simply log into your registrar and buy it. Now lets say you want hamburgers.mobi…well now that is different. Shouldn’t it be first come first serve? There never was an open market for these “Premium domains” they are all auctioned off to the highest bidder to put more money in the pocket of a greedy company. Now lets take a look at the .ASIA extension. Can you guess what they want to do? You got it…AUCTION OFF EVERY DOMAIN!!!!!! So if you and another guy look into the same domain name that is two interested parties, now you must bid against each other for the .ASIA domain. There is no fairness or openness to this method.

Earlier this month VoIP launched RazrClick a Pay Per Call advertising
service. Now for those of you who may not be familiar with pay per
call, it is a form of advertising similar to PPC with the exception
that with Pay Per Call the advertiser will actually get a phone call.

This
is basically how it works. The merchant defines his relevant keywords
or terms and chooses the desired vertical or category. The advertiser
can set up Geo Targeting with most providers to really get granular
with the market and delivery of their ad. After the campaign is set up
you can create the ad containing your pitch or company name, address, a
description of your service or goods, and a toll free tracking number
that will reroute to your phone and allow you to track your potential
sales calls.

One clear advantage of Pay Per Call over Pay Per
Click is the click fraud that is rampant in Pay Per Click is currently
not an issue with Pay Per Call. Even though Pay Per Call is just
getting started, it is projected that by 2009 the Pay Per Call revenue
in U.S alone will top 4 billion dollars. Advertisers pay
on average $8 to $10 per Pay-Per-Call considerably higher than they
might pay for a typical Pay-Per-Click
ad. VoIP, not only  intends to capture a share of this Pay Per Call
market with the release of RazrClick, they intend to capture the whole
thing. They claim that they have the only existing patent for the
technology and plan to aggressively pursue any infringer’s.

“There are many companies that are providing Pay-Per-Click
advertising. However, after careful research and consulting with
attorneys we believe we have the only patent in this space,” stated
Anthony Cataldo, CEO VoIP, Inc. “We intend to aggressively pursue all
infringers so that our shareholders can reap the benefit of the value
this patent affords the company; additionally we believe that all
providers of this type of advertising/technology are directly
violating our patents.”
Anthony Cataldo was also quoted as saying
“We have identified over 100 companies that have willfully infringed on our
patents. We intend to stop the infringement and defend our technology and the
patents behind it. These patents and the business they represent will be
utilized to provide the shareholders with the value they deserve and have long
awaited,” stated CEO Anthony Cataldo. “Citing case studies, in reference to
Click to Call, from Fortune 500 companies such as Continental Airlines, the ROI
was 50x cost of service. The service showed a 35% lead conversion rate twice
that of traditional leads and reduced website abandonment by over 25%.”
It will be interesting to see how this plays out. In the end regardless
of the patent, I believe that Pay Per Call will offer a great
additional solution to a well rounded marketing campaign.

Hello, and welcome to PPC Playground. I decided to start this blog to talk about the PPC Industry, tactics, tips and whatever else I can think of that is relevant to the subject. I will be covering topics such as bid management, long tail strategies, contextual targeting, and much more. Stay tuned and keep checking back or grab the RSS feed to stay up to date on the newest posts.