Bigger Sites May Not Be Better for Online Advertisers

Advertising on smaller niche sites could make a big difference.

In the glory days of television, when mass media reigned, media planners could buy time on CBS, NBC and ABC and waltz out for a three-martini lunch. Easy as that.

Times have changed, of course. Today, planning multimedia advertising campaigns is far more complex. But media planners would still prefer to keep things as simple as possible. When it comes to the online portion of their budgets, they buy Google, Yahoo! and a few major vertical-interest sites and, often enough, that is about it.

Merrill Lynch projects that both search and branded advertising will grow online next year, up 27% and 21%, respectively.

But continuing to put the bulk of online ad dollars on large sites could be a mistake. Big, particularly on the Internet, may not be better.

According to new research from Media-Screen, when brand managers and media planners are choosing where to place their ads online, they should not ignore smaller sites with less traffic.

The "Netpop | Response" study found that small, long-tail Web sites are indispensable to consumers — and they provide a new way for brands to position ads where users want to see them.

Interest in the products and brands advertised on smaller sites is greater than on larger sites: According to the study, 42% of sites with less than one million unique visitors a month advertise products of interest to their viewers, vs. 39% of sites with more than one million visitors.

The difference is small, but for savvy advertisers looking for an edge, it is worth exploring.

"Consumers have gained control over the content they consume online and advertisers need to adjust their strategies to match," said Josh Crandall of Media-Screen. "By advertising on smaller Websites, those that consumers are visiting based on their personal interests, companies can reach a highly engaged consumer with a message that relates to a subject that is important to them."

Advertisers should consider putting at least some of their online budgets aside for experimenting with niche site placements.

"Search engines are a driving force behind these trends, enabling broadbanders to venture beyond the major brands to the niche sites they previously never knew existed," said Cate Riegner of Media-Screen. "62% of sites that respondents mention receive less than one million unique visitors."

Source: http://www.emarketer.com/Article.aspx?1004465&src=article1_home

Local Online Advertising: Measuring the Potential

With $1.3 billion spending in 2006, representing only 7.9% of the total $16.7 billion in US Internet ad spending for the year, local online advertising remains more promise than fulfillment. While marketing factors will drive significant this year and next, the boom in local online advertising is not here yet.

Summary | Table of Contents | Sources

Attention: Marketers, Advertising Agencies, Portals, Online and Offline Retailers, Large Corporations and SMEs and Financial Analysts.

The Local Online Advertising report analyzes the burgeoning growth of local online ads, and why paid search is the driving factor behind it.

Just as paid search contributes over 40% to the total US online ad spending market, so it is for local online advertising, where paid search provides over 55% of the local total. These are notable figures, especially when you factor in the relative immaturity of the local search market.

But make no mistake, the boom has not hit yet. Even when local online ad spending jumps by nearly 53% next year to $2.0 billion, that will make it not quite 10% of the 2007 estimate of $20.3 billion for total online advertising.

Key questions the "Local Online Advertising" report answers:

• When will local online advertising become a significant channel for national advertisers?
• Among web advertisers, who will be the biggest players in local online advertising?
• Where does local online advertising fit in the overall advertising picture?
• How can paid search become more effective for SMBs in local markets?
• Can the US newspaper industry use the Internet to regain advertising relevance?
• And many more…

eMarketer Reports—On-Target and Up-to-Date

The Local Online Advertising report aggregates the latest data from marketing and communications researchers with eMarketer numbers, projections and analysis to provide the information you need to make smart business, marketing and advertising decisions for the future.

Source: http://www.emarketer.com/Reports/All/Ad_local_jul06.aspx

Yahoo explains its new bidding system

The New Bidding System

Helpful hints for managing your account

No feature of the new Sponsored Search has garnered more attention in the blogosphere than the bidding system, with its snappy, graphical presentation and dynamic slider-bar functionality.

Kudos aside, we know new things can sometimes be a little bit confusing. So here’s a little play-by-play of how the new bidding system works. Take a look at the screenshot below:

Notice in the lower-right corner (highlighted) that there are two boxes. Each box contains a data tool that corresponds to a specific set of information: Estimated Clicks per Bid and Bid Range for Top Positions.

Bid Range for Top Positions
This bit of data is designed to help you with your bidding decisions at the ad group level or at the keyword level depending on how tightly you want to manage your bids. In general, you may want to manage at the ad group level, as you might find this to be easier. For special, high-priority keywords, however, you may want to manage at the keyword level. (To manage at the keyword level, just click on the keyword itself.) The Bid Range for Top Positions column is designed to offer the latest available range of bids for the positions at the top of the search results page. Want to appear at the top? Then your bid must be within or above this range.

Estimated Clicks per Bid sliding graph

This groovy little widget is designed to help you understand the number of clicks your ad may receive for a given bid. This information is important if you want to see how changes in your bid may affect your results. By moving the slider back and forth to increase or decrease your bid, you can see how your estimated monthly clicks, your position and share of available clicks may be impacted. The estimated number of clicks is calculated using your bid and historical keyword data (such as the previous bids of other advertisers, monthly click volume for your keywords, and other factors).

So which tool should I use?
It depends on what you’re trying to do. If you want your ad to appear at the top of the search results, then consider using the Bid Range for Top Positions to help guide your bidding. If you want to estimate how many clicks you may receive for a particular bid, use the Estimated Clicks per Bid sliding graph.It’s important to note that the Bid Range for Top Positions uses recent data and the Clicks per Bid sliding graph uses historical data, so there may sometimes appear to be a discrepancy between the two data sets. Also, please remember that both of these features use estimates only and are not a guarantee of click volume. Factors other than bid amount—such as the bidding behavior of other advertisers, your campaign settings and your ad performance—may also influence your position.

Thanks and happy bidding!

—The Team

Source: http://www.ysmblog.com/blog/2007/01/08/the-new-bidding-system/

Google Security Hole Allows Account Hijacking

It’s your worst nightmare – someone reads parts of your Google emails, views your docs, modifies your spreadsheets, checks out your reading habits on the Google personalized homepage or Google Reader, and goes through your search history. Yet, by making use of a new Google security hole, Tony Ruscoe was able to do all that with my Google account.

Tony’s not a malicious hacker of course (in fact, the first thing he did was inform Google Security!), but he found a loophole in a new feature Google rolled out recently. Using a proof of concept script targeting this loophole – which I can detail once it’s fixed –, all Tony needed to do was make a user who’s logged into their Google Account visit a page of his, which happened to be on a “trustworthy” google.com sub-domain. I visited Tony’s page, which sent my Google cookies to Tony, which in turn enabled him to:

• Get into my Google Docs & Spreadsheets application and read and modify documents I saved there
• Read subjects from my Gmail inbox, as well as the first few words of these emails, by adding a Gmail module to the Google Personalized Homepage
• View my Google Accounts page
• Enter my Google Reader
• Read my private Google Notebook
• View my complete Google search history (for as long as I had the search history feature enabled in Google)

This is by far not the end of services Tony was able to see in our brief tests. What he specifically was not able to do was to read my full emails, check my Calendar events, or change my Google Account password (which would’ve given him full access to anything, basically).

Now, the vulnerability in question is a very special kind, and Tony, by “claiming” this loophole, also blocked it for other abusers. This means that for the sake of this case, even though Google didn’t yet fix the hole, there is nothing to worry about (except that someone might find more holes in the vicinity of this bug). However, I am posting on this because it’s a worthwhile reminder that no company’s security is ever completely cracker-proof; in very rare circumstances, whatever you saved in Google, or entered in Google, can escape your control and land in the wrong hands. Or, as Tony phrased it on his proof of concept page, “Think yourself lucky that I wasn’t that evil!”

Source: http://blog.outer-court.com/archive/2007-01-12-n73.html