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A search on yahoo for "Diego Maradona" produces zero results with the message: On the occasion of a court order sought by private parties, we have been forced to temporarily remove some or all of the search results relating to it.

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Check it out. From the conference site: The way to online success is through being easily found in search engines such as Google, Yahoo!, and Microsoft Live Search. While developers have historically thought of search as a marketing activity, technical architecture has now become critical for search success. Found…



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Posted by rebecca

I’m a fan of Digg and visit it every day to read various stories and check out what’s new. Every so often I comment on stories and submit stuff. I get a "woo hoo!" feeling whenever one of my comments gets a bunch of diggs or when a submission hits the home page, which, combined with the site’s content and news stories, are what keep me coming back for more. Sure, lots of people bash Digg for being juvenile and too much of a boys’ club, but since I’m a tomboy and often have the sense of humor of a 19-year old dude (my coworkers note that I average at least one poo or butt joke a week), Digg’s community is just fine by me.

Lately the site has been cracking down on a lot of things and has been banning users and domains for committing various offenses. The latest user bans have mostly consisted of people who have used scripts to auto-digg stories, but there’s been another crackdown that, in my opinion, is illogical and a wee bit ridiculous. Digg has banned sites that are commercial or salesy. Case in point: A friend of mine recently tried to submit content from a client’s website. It was an interesting blog post that wasn’t inundated with commercial links or calls to action on the page. However, he found out that Digg had banned the domain because the URL was commercial in nature (e.g., "greatcomputerdeals.com"). He tried to appeal his case, to no avail (I’ve heard from other Digg users that getting a ban lifted from your site is extremely difficult). Digg has also warned users who have submitted commercial domains and have even banned a few (I know of at least one user who was banned for submitting content from a retail site).

I understand the intent: Digg wants to prevent spammers from submitting pages from cheap-viagra-123.net and downgrading the quality of content on the site. However, what’s the problem with a site like smartautoloans.com submitting an article about "How Not to Get Screwed When Buying Your First Car," especially when the content stems from the site’s blog and is truly informative and interesting? Why should the fact that the domain is commercial ruin the quality of the content?

An easy example to refer to is Matt Inman and his free dating sites (Mingle2, then JustSayHi, then back to Mingle2). He’s created a bunch of successful quizzes and comics that were geared to promote his dating site and drive signups. A lot of them became popular on Digg, but because of the recent crackdown, he’s wary about submitting anything from the Mingle2 domain, despite the fact that the Digg community as a whole enjoys the content (sure, there are some people who lament the Mingle2 "spam," but many users noted that they didn’t mind that the content came from a dating site and applauded the clever promotional tactics). Is anyone really going "Hey, this ‘8 Phases of Dating’ cartoon is really funny! Wait, it came from a free dating site? Oh, eff that, this content sucks!"?  

Honestly, shouldn’t the users be able to decide if content from a commercial website is valuable instead of Digg automatically implementing a ban on the site simply because its domain is commercial in nature and the site sells stuff? And what about sites that serve up ads? Technically those are commercial websites because they’re making money from ads, right?

Let’s take a look at the stories that are currently top in all topics:

• "I can’t imagine a President being named Obama" — a video on YouTube, which serves ads on its home page
• Republicans Voting for Obama: In Their Own Words —  an article from The Huffington Post, which serves ads all over the article page
• Think Firefox 3 is fast? Try Firefox Minefield — an article from CNET, which serves ads and has affiliate partnerships with retailers selling the products that the site reviews
• Fake Cop Busted After Pulling Over Real Cop — an article from the Chicago Tribune, which serves ads and has affiliate partnerships with sites like Cars.com, Gadzoo.com, Apartments.com, and CareerBuilder.com in their Classifieds section
• Obama Has Some Fantasy Football Skills –  an article from ESPN.com, which serves ads, has a subscription service for both their magazine and exclusive access to the site, sells books, and charges for some of their fantasy leagues
• Economy Crashes but War Profiteers Doing Fine — an article from Reuters, which serves ads and sells "Reuters Professional Products" to professionals
• Why are Docs From the Bailout Being Redacted? — an article from Propublica.org, an independent, non-profit site that produces "investigative journalism in the public interest." I couldn’t find any ads or obvious commercial intent, which makes sense for a non-profit site.
• Rick Astley might be given up and let down by MTV? — an article from BestActEver.com, a pro-Rick Astley website that was trying to get Rick Astley voted as "Best Act Ever" for the MTV Europe Awards. Aside from the website’s explicit awesomeness, I couldn’t find any obvious commercial intent.
• World’s most ineffective theft deterrent — an image from Flickr, which sells Pro accounts for upgraded uploads and account features
• Gmail’s Canned Responses is E-mail for the Lazy! — an article from Wired, which serves ads and sells subscription services to their magazine

Okay, so out of the top 10 stories on Digg, only 2 can technically be defined as non-commercial in nature. The other 8 make money somehow–and really, what’s wrong with that? Ain’t no shame in rakin’ in some green. So why are these sites given a pass while other more obvious commercial sites are vilified? Sure, the above domains are more established and mainstream, so I can understand why their content is featured. But honestly, shouldn’t great content from a mid-level commercial domain be able to speak for itself? Why does it have to come from Wired or ESPN in order to be acceptable?   

You could argue that most of the "commercial" sites I mentioned make their money from ad revenue and that Diggers don’t click on ads, so therefore it’s not really commercial, after all. Well sure, but I’m willing to bet that most of them wouldn’t buy office supplies from a site whose "5 Best Movie Office Drones" list made the home page, either. It’s pretty widely established that Digg is pretty abysmal for driving conversions, whether that conversion is a sale, sign up, or ad click. The goal of social media marketing is largely traffic and links, which in turn can lead to better rankings and conversions. So if ad-driven sites like Cracked and Forbes.com (with their stupid, stupid slideshows that are designed to serve up a buttload of ads per page) are fine because "Diggers don’t click on ads," why isn’t a product site okay since Diggers likely won’t buy, anyway? And even if they do buy, what’s wrong with that? What’s wrong with a user reading an article or post and then clicking on an ad that interests him or buying a product that he needs or wants? How is that providing a negative experience to the end user?

Angry gripes aside, it’s likely Digg won’t change their stance any time soon, so if you’re a commercial website with a commercial-looking domain, your chances of Digg success are slim unless you’re willing to try some clever workarounds. That’s not to say that social media marketing won’t work for you–there’s still lots of stuff you can leverage (StumbleUpon, Delicious, industry-appropriate forums, etc). However, if you’re looking for success on Digg, it won’t come easy. I guess that’s the price you pay for trying to earn a buck. 

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A little more than year ago I presented you 7 social browsing services that will kill Digg and SEO 1.0 - most notably StumbleUpon but also Yoono or Me.Dium.
The decline of Digg seems unstoppable and at least blogs by now have far more visitors from StumbleUpon than Google so that SEOs had to adapt and […]
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Li Evans talks openly about her father’s death and how Social Communities helped her deal with her grief.

She also puts together a nice list of Online Memorial Sites for our human loved ones as well as pets.

46 Vote(s)

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Posted by Marty Martin

"You’ve arrived in a new city, a new continent, a new coffee shop. You don’t really know where you are, and are looking for a good place to eat. You pull out your laptop, fire up Firefox, and go to your favorite review site. It automatically deduces your location, and serves up some delicious suggestions a couple blocks away and plots directions there."

From Mozilla Labs Geode project.

OVERVIEW

I’m not going to discuss any of the nitty gritty of how the new application works, but rather, the implications for us as search engine optimizers and marketers.  Obviously, the ability to geolocate a website visitor and serve them a custom advertisement is a pretty powerful feature, but generally speaking we can already do those sorts of things with IP-based tools like traceroute, right?  What’s the advantage here?Most IP-based location services are not terribly accurate depending on the visitor’s ISP and where they’re connecting from.  You can generally get a region or city-based lock on someone based on their assigned IP address, which is useful and highly used now by advertising networks and others. Skyhook Wireless has developed an application called Loki, and Mozilla, by adapting it for use with Geode, can pinpoint your wireless signal to within 10 to 20 meters normally within one second.  That’s pretty impressive.

PRIVACY - What’s a user to do?

There has been a lot of controversy lately about ISP behavioral targeting with the announcement that the US Congress has been investigating some of the larger ISPs and their use of tracking software.  Currently, the Geode service is a double opt-in type service, requiring the user to download and install it, and then to confirm the transmission of their location and other details (your exact location or maybe just the general neighborhood, city or nothing) to the requesting website.  So from a privacy standpoint, it looks like you’re pretty safe (until you download that screensaver with that neat toolbar that doesn’t mention what it’s doing in the background).

CLOAKING - Who, me? I swear Matt, it wasn’t me!

I don’t want to open up the whole can of worms that is cloaking, but I don’t think there’s any way to avoid it.  With a powerful new tool like this, how much more interactive can we make our websites, and serve customized content based on users’ geolocation?  Is this a legitimate use of cloaking?  What if Yelp’s home page were changed to automatically alter its content to show you all the great Ballard coffee shops within 2 blocks of your location near the corner of 31st Avenue NW & NW 85th Street? Is this cloaking? Yes. Is it an acceptable use? Maybe. Depends on the shade of your hat at the moment and which way the wind is blowing here.

A BIGGER PICTURE - Maybe.

I think the biggest use for advertisers is going to be the extreme local.  Let’s go back to that fishing village coffee shop mentioned above.  You’ve had your caffeine, it’s 10pm, where are you going to go now? You fire up your wifi connection, ask Jeeves and are presented with a spiffy ad of the hot rave party happening right now…just a few blocks away. What the heck are we waiting for, let’s get out there.  We all know the more relevant the ad is to the viewer, the more likely it will convert them.  I think this application will be more useful in larger cities, maybe not as much in small cities and towns.  It might be a really cool new LoJack tool too.  Can you imagine the look of surprise on that perp’s face when you walk over and jack him up for stealing your phone?

CONCLUSION

I really want this post to open up some conversation on other potential uses/abuses and your thoughts on the matter.  So let’s hear your thoughts on the subject!

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I’ve had down time the last few days due to a tummy bug. Sounds a bit fluffy and cuddly doesn’t it, a “tummy bug”. When the reality is….. well, I’m not going to go into the reality.
But reading Marty Weintraub’s story puts it in perspective. I Was Diagnosed With Stage 3B Lymphoma The good thing […]
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I travel to London today to go cover the first London Search Marketing Expo. It will also be my first time at a search conference. I finally get to breathe the same air as people I have been sucking information out of for years. You probably don’t want to hear how excited I am to […]
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Turning clicks into customers
I usually don’t mention when a site gets a redesign, but this is a little different. I first blogged about Conversion Rate Experts, aka Ben and Karl way back in 2006. I could see then that these guys were special.

They specialise in a niche of seo called conversions, meaning they help you […]
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We’re getting close to approaching critical mass on friend feed, and with twitter’s horrible performance and feature removal yes I think it’s time people start looking at friend feed.
if you’re interested you can follow me there Michael Gray on Friend Feed
Feel free to drop a link to your profile in the comments, spam from low […]
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Today’s search engine marketing news and opinion: The Big Picture — Well-Rounded SEM for SMBs; SEO Competitive Analysis; Google Maps Adds Richer Data to Search; and more.
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You love basketball? I do. This video recap, I play some basketball and you can score some great schwag by watching me play. Learn how by watching. So what did I chat about? Google proves to everyone out there that they know who you are, what you are doing and how much you can spend with Google Ad Manager and Google Trends for Websites. I discuss the long URL post I wrote this week on Google. Google added porn to search results, but allows us to report it now. Yahoo drops the Overture keyword suggestion tool. Google Webmaster Tools gives us an API. Ask.com is not focused on search and I give some reasons. Yahoo is in shambles, can they pick themselves up or is it too late? Google turns five years old!

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Some Of The Topics Discussed:

• Detailed Screen Shots of Google’s New Ad Planner :: Wow!
• Google Launches Ad Planner - What Google Really Knows About Your Sites
• Google Trends for Websites : Rather Not Have It? Seriously?
• Google Says, Long URLs May Hurt You
• Porn Continues to Invade Google Web Search Through Universal Search
• Yahoo Finally Kills Overture’s Keyword Suggestion Tool?
• Finally, We Get an API for Google Webmaster Tools, But…
• Ask.com: Not Focused on Core Search, or is it?
• Yahoo Prepares Massive Upper Management Reorganization for Possible Acquisitions
• Google AdSense Turns Five Years Old

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This is a major loss. I am a big Jeff Weiner fan. As Om said, Ouch. Clearly I missed this, and Jeremy’s exit as well. Wow, those were two of the guys I really respected there. There are others, of course, but from what I can tell, they are…
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Funny look at that classic result when you search for the google logo

30 Vote(s)

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Kevin Lee is the CEO of the search engine marketing firm Didit and an engaging speaker at many search conferences. While he loves his PPC, he also sells SEO videos on his personal blog. We recently chatted back and forth via email, and decided it would be a good idea to do an interview. Here are the questions I asked Kevin and his answers.

A recent report from a SEM firm highlighted that 55% of their clicks from the search portion of Yahoo! Search Marketing do not come from Yahoo! Search, but from syndication partners. Does that number sound high to you?

Yes, based on the last time I looked. I don’t have the latest HTTP referrer analysis handy, but I recall that the last time I looked the percentages varied rather dramatically by industry and keyword due to the fact that many of the domain traffic sources end up being lumped in as search. However, I’m not sure if that SEM had content turned on to get YPN traffic.

Why hasn’t Yahoo! made it easier to opt out of syndication like Google has?

Yahoo has made some small progress in this direction but for the main search function it may have resisted the opt-out functionality for some combination of the following:

1. Once you leave Yahoo, their network becomes highly distributed. Unlike Google which could at least hypothetically provide specific opt-in/out control or even bid boost-depression control on AOL and ASK, Yahoo doesn’t have any mega-search partners.
2. The technological work in facilitating an opt-out system is significant and Yahoo has had its hands full with a bunch of other things
3. They may be concerned about a mass-opt-out which would result in revenue drops at both Yahoo and their syndication partners resulting in a likely loss of those syndication partners upon deal-renewal.
4. They may believe rightly or wrongly that not enough marketers would be interested in taking advantage of that functionality or care to exercise that level of control

It’s my opinion that Yahoo should certainly dedicate additional technology resources to the search-side of the business.

Yahoo! has the syndication that can’t be opted out from, and by default Google opts advertisers into everything. And then there is broad match which might be a bit broad for some advertisers. It seems the networks almost have an “ignorance tax” which hurt many small advertisers who do not know any better. Each cool new feature they add works as a bonus for firms like Didit, while working against people new to the field. At what budget scale does it make sense to start looking for outsourced help?

I agree that the current ecosystem has an ignorance tax. However, one could make the same argument about nearly every form of marketing. Paid search can of course get particularly complex when one looks at all the targeting, segmenting and bidding levers available. As to the outsourcing issue. I think many marketers and agencies consider the idea of outsourced search a binary decision. It’s actually a continuum, more like the areas of legal work. A mid-to-large firm may have in-house legal counsel yet often still outsources certain work based on a variety of factors including how critical the issue is as well as whether they think their in-house team can handle it from either a production or skill level basis. Search is the same way. Some of our clients outsource everything to us, others use our managed technology option which we offer only to specific marketers where we believe that their in-house team can handle production and most of the strategy.

So, I’d urge any marketers that feels like they are missing either opportunities or perhaps running a wasteful campaign due to strategic issues, inferior campaign management technology, poor analytics or simply the fact that they can’t get the vast amounts of production work done to investigate partnerships that will help them achieve maximum overall profitability.

Also, when thinking about outsourcing, consider that technology can help ease a big chunk of the production burden, but someone still has to do the blocking and tackling within a campaign. In nearly every case, you get what you pay for (or less than you paid for), but rarely does one get more than one is paying for when it comes to production work.

In a number of past interviews you have highlighted that advertising has the ability to drive search volume. Does advertising that drives search volume typically drive it mainly for brand related queries? Does the value of the average search end up increasing or decreasing when search volume is build via advertising?

Advertising, PR and marketing of all sorts generally spikes brand keyword traffic to the largest degree. However, depending on the message of the advertising and the industry category, it may drive a significant lift in generic volume. As you might expect, that results in some really interesting opportunities to take advantage of volatility in keyword-search volume across a broad spectrum. It also make media mix modeling of search particularly tricky since you may have to add in external variables other than your own marketing/advertising.

Generally there aren’t major changes in the conversion rates when search was stimulated by advertising vs other factors. The reality is that most search was stimulated by some external factor. People don’t sit bolt upright at 3AM saying to themselves that they need to search for an “Alaskan cruise vacation.”

Speaking of brand, when is it beneficial to bid on brand related queries? What bid strategies make sense on brand related queries if the brand already dominates the organic search results?

Thus far in all the experiments and test we’ve conducted brand bidding is still worth doing even when the organic result is #1. Often to get the highest combined ROI the offer/landing page needs to be different. With universal search and the continued evolution of personalized search results within Google there’s an increasing likelihood that brand bidding will be a net-positive even after cannibalization if factored in. The increase in ROI and profit is more dramatic if others are bidding on the brand, but surprisingly even in instances where the brand is the only paid advertiser, it still generally is worth bidding. However, it’s something I’d always recommend structuring testing and experimentation around.

John Battelle believes that “brands are conversations,” and is pushing something he calls conversational marketing. Do you think this movement will make a big impact on the web? Have you used the strategy for any of your clients?

I’m not sure I’d call it a “movement” more than any other scheme or analysis of marketing is a movement. Consumers have conversations about brands. Conversations about brands, problems and solutions stimulate search behavior. One can of course try to be present within conversations directly (which is a non-trivial problem), try to insert one’s brand into existing conversations (dangerous if it is done wrong) or simply wait patiently in the SERP for the curiosity of the consumer to manifest itself in search. I’m going overboard to make a point, but, the challenge for the marketer is determining the marginal value that any conversation has in moving the consumer closer to a purchase. That challenge holds true for any marketing or advertising. Increases in early brand metrics only matter if the consumer either purchases themselves or influences others to purchase.

In a number of your columns you have talked about search and the buying cycle. What strategies do you find most effective for early stage searches? How do those strategies compare to brand keywords and other keywords with more purchase intent?

Even on late stage keywords, clearly the vast majority of searchers don’t convert, at least not online. Other than a couple of instances with brand keywords, I can’t recall conversion rates even approaching 50%. So, the first hurdle for the search marketer is to get the CMO on-board with the idea of targeting a larger pool of non-immediate converters. It still makes sense to take every incremental marketing dollar and go after the next segment of converters. It’s trick is to understand the marginal value of each click based on conversion profiles and then you’ll know the best way to work back the buying cycle toward awareness and consideration while still capturing those consumers who were open to converting in the near term. Clearly the messaging in ads and landing pages may need to migrate a bit as one moves away from simply harvesting demand to helping influence the consumer during earlier stages of the buying cycle.

For a person short on budget running a small campaign, are the tools provided by the search ad networks adequate? Are there any other budget analytics or PPC tools that are surprisingly good? Would you suggest trusting sending your conversion data to Google Analytics?

Even for small marketers, I think one can make the case for the value of third-party analytics and technology. There are clearly reasons why one might not want the advertising seller to know the conversion data, but the issue is even broader than that. In a world where one of the next big frontiers is behavioral targeting, do you really want to give the traffic sellers BT data that might be exploitable at some point down the road?

Several firms are attacking the small marketer market with respect to search. One promising upcoming candidate is Clickable.com. They are technically still in beta I believe, but their mission is admirable.

A lot of affordable competitive research tools (like Compete.com, KeyCompete, Keyword Spy) have been launched in the past few years. Have you compared any of these to the higher priced services? Are these competitive research tools giving smaller players a chance, or are they only working to consolidate traffic for the largest market players?

We license the raw comScore data and have built internal tools and reports that have been quite valuable. I’ve experimented with many of the other services and the biggest problem with most of them for smaller marketers is that as one moves into the tail, data validity drops. So, ironically some of these tools are more useful for larger marketers than smaller ones.

comScore data has shown Google has been displaying ads against a smaller set of their total search queries over the last year. Does that trend surprise you? Might it go the other direction at some point?

There’s no point in showing ads if the ads aren’t sufficiently relevant. However as all of us know, Google uses both the carrot and the stick to drive marketers towards higher relevance in the PPC portion of the SERPS. As marketers build out content and ads to take advantage of this fact, it is quite conceivable that the ratio of paid to organic results could reverse itself and we see both more ads and more ads showing up above the organic results.

Have you found business models that do not do well with search? Or businesses that have done better than expected? What are some key signs and metrics for knowing if a business model works well with search?

Arbitrage doesn’t work as well as it used to. At some level of scale, one can get almost any business to work, but doing well requires that you have some advantages in your business over the competition. After all, economically speaking once everyone is making rational bid decisions (which may not happen for a while) if your competition have huge cost or profitability advantages over you even the best bidding strategies will have to cede them top position in many cases due to their inherent advantages.

In this video interview with Sage Lewis you talk about how with scale it is easy to break through many efficiency plateaus. What are some of the most common issues holding back new advertisers (or old advertisers with broken strategy)?

Ahh, the old logo and the frog. I miss them sometimes.

The most common thing I see is a failure to accurately predict their missed opportunities. Waste can be found in campaigns fairly easily but missed opportunities are difficult to quantify. So, they are usually significantly underestimated. As you well know, this is a challenge with organic SEO as well. Lack of the right technology of course cripples the marketer from executing on many of the strategies that would bring increase profit and scale. Lack of sufficient production capability is also a huge hurdle. If you never get around to the account reorgs ad testing, landing page testing or the keyword expansions you’ll continue to miss those opportunities.

Lack of education as you pointed out ends up also being a huge issue for new advertisers.

The Google AdWords blog had a post titled Websites that may merit a low landing page quality score. Some thin affiliates have been slapped with $10 minimum bids on every keyword, and can not profitably buy any traffic from Google. It seems Google is trying to clean up their ad network on some fronts, and yet they showed my wife an ad for cheating lonely housewives. If Google openly discriminates in their pricing models based on how well they like the business model of the advertiser, are they endorsing the ads that they allow to run for months and years? That lonely cheating wives ad was publicly referenced last November and the ad is still running.

I think Google continues to put most of its relevance efforts into its own SERP. If some irrelevant ads show up in the contextual network, unless the publisher complains, there’s not really damage to the Google brand among consumers.

As an SEO, in my experience, the complexity of the ranking algorithms and the amount of money needed to reliably rank in Google keeps increasing the opportunity cost of ranking in the organic search results (unless there is a healthy dose of public relations, brand building, promotion, community participation, and traditional marketing in that SEO mix). In a couple of past interviews you (at least to some extent) equated SEO to spam (or at least used both words in close proximity). Do you still think that SEOs have control over Google or do you see Google gaining more leverage in the relationship?

I’ve probably been taken out of context somewhat. However, I firmly believe that in the log run, Google, Yahoo and MSFT will police both their organic and their paid search listings (not so much contextual and behavioral) to assure relevance. That means that if you start to engage in SEO and you couldn’t make a credible argument as to why you in fact are the most relevant to a room full of strangers then you probably will get booted from the SERPS even if you used black-hat SEO to successfully manipulate yourself to the top. It’s not so much about leverage, as it is about tools Google could conceivably use to gauge relevance that they may not be using now. For example, the toolbars you see proliferating could watch post-click behavior and that could be combined with click-back percentages (those who abandon the top-listed site returning to the SERP) to flush out results that are not particularly relevant in comparison to others.

Marketers without the rankings their content deserves should absolutely invest in SEO. Those with the ability to create additional great content that ranks well should similarly invest. However, the one key thing is that when it comes to SEO, as with Public Relations, expectations need to be reasonable. If an SEO practitioner (in-house or outsourced) promises results that Matt Cutts would likely grade as poor quality SERPs well, then even in the unlikely instance where success was attained with white-hat methods there is clear risk that those results will be temporary.

One of my favorite SEO strategies is to use PPC to drive traffic to key pages for link building. What are your favorite PPC strategies that are rarely talked about, and do you use an SEO techniques to augment your paid search campaigns?

Actually your strategy is interesting, because it partially explains why relevant sites in the organic results often remain there. They get lots of traffic, some of those visitors blog, and even if one out of 1000 visitors links-in, that process creates a really sticky feedback loop for PageRank generation.

People rarely talk about geotargeting and dayparting. Both are favorites of mine. I’m a big fan of any segmentation analysis and cluster modeling that helps marketers cherry-pick the very best clicks from the stream of possibilities.

I advise clients to train their webmasters on SEO basics and best practices because if they are in fact relevant, perhaps some of their existing visitor stream will blog and can help cement better organic position.

Didit is one of the most well known and respected brands in the PPC space. What were some of the keys to growing into your market position?

Being around for a dozen years doesn’t hurt. However, putting the client’s success first is really the key. That forces us to innovate and also puts the pressure on us to provide the right level of service given the relationship. Many people also seem to appreciate our passion for the industry. We do a ton of speaking, writing and are involved in trade associations.

PPC ad networks, like search engines, have many publish guidelines. Some of which are loosely enforced, and some may erode profit to follow. Have you ever recommended to a client that they ignore such policies? Have you ever fought a search engine’s policies and got them to change them?

We encourage marketers who have an issue with a guideline to understand the reason he guideline exists. That helps predict the likelihood of enforcement if something is perhaps in the grey zone and a policy might end up being tested. Similarly, that same understanding is key is attempting to get a policy changed or an exception made.

Thanks Kevin!

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