I know this industry evolves fast, but damn! Just 18 months ago, most media planners and search marketers had not heard of search retargeting, and already we are in what could easily be called version 3.0. With the agency hat back on (for today), we look at whether this tactic is living up to the growing hype. When the principle was first explained to me, I was running an agency display media team at a search agency that was focused on direct response clients; I was therefore interested in tactics that involved precise data points as a way to focus on user intent. Search retargeting seem [...]

Related Topics: Advanced | How To: SEM | Search & Display | Search Ads | Search Ads: Behavioral Targeting | Search Ads: Contextual

Twitter's rumored Promoted Tweets are now official, launching only a day after the very similar TweetUp launched (will that be DOA?). Promoted Tweets has two phases, which might be described as an AdWords phase and an AdSense phase. The AdWords part is what is launching first. Marketers buy keywords (for now on a CPM basis) and their ads show up at the top of Twitter searches as sponsored tweets. It's paid search. And I can see the future SMX Advanced panel now: "Best Practices for Twitter Search Campaigns." Apparently Twitter has "huge" search volume, according to COO Dick Costolo, tho [...]

Related Topics: Search Ads: Contextual | Search Ads: General | Top News | Twitter

VigLink is a new service with venture capital backing from Google that aims to make it easy for publishers to earn through affiliate programs. It promises to turn any outbound link on a web site into an affiliate link after the installation of a small bit of JavaScript code. VigLink is in the news today primarily because the company has announced that it has closed a round of seed investment, for $800,000 in total. From the press release, funding sources include: Google Ventures, and individual investors including LinkedIn Founder Reid Hoffman, longtime Google executive and current LinkedI [...]

Related Topics: Features: General | Google: Business Issues | Google: SEO | Link Building: Paid Links | Search Ads: Contextual | SEO: Spamming | Top News

First to pounce on the SEC 8-K filing by Yahoo was PaidContent, which provides an extensive bulleted list of many of the deal terms not revealed last week during the frenzy of conference calls and articles that followed the official announcement of the Microsoft-Yahoo search deal. CNET also writes about selected aspects of the deal contained in the filing, specifically an "escape clause" (termination) for Yahoo (see below). And the AP has a short piece on how the deal terms require Microsoft to hire at least 400 Yahoo employees. Here are some verbatim excerpts from the SEC filing: Negotiat [...]

Related Topics: Business Issues: Acquisitions & Investments | Features: Analysis | Google: Business Issues | Microsoft & Yahoo Search Deal | Microsoft: adCenter | Microsoft: Business Issues | Microsoft: Employees | Microsoft: General | Search Ads: Contextual | Search Ads: General | Search Ads: Mobile Search | Top News

Privacy is dead, get used to it. In the effort to rescue display advertising from its historically dismal performance and so-called "banner blindness," behavioral targeting (BT) was born a few years ago with Tacoda. It has both increased in popularity and infamy since that time. Consumers prefer more "relevant" ads but they also dislike being tracked. That's the paradox and the problem with BT. Here's the issue in a nutshell. According to a March 2008 survey by Truste (written up in MediaPost), "nearly three out of four people, or 71%, said they realize that companies track their Web browsin [...]

Related Topics: Legal: Privacy | Search Ads: Behavioral Targeting | Search Ads: Contextual