Today’s Byte is probably of most interest to anyone who runs or is thinking about online ads. (For those who aren’t interested in online ads – here’s a quick fun site on the Super Bowl ads http://www.superbowl-ads.com.)
Google and Yahoo/Overture are the two biggest pay per click vendors. They sell ads on search engines and their content partners sites. Advertisers buy ads through a bidding process and only pay when visitors click on their ads.
I have always loved Overture because they have always made their ad processing very transparent. You can see who is bidding for your terms, how much they are bidding, and you can see their ads. And their ranking was only based on the bids.
Well this week they are making changes. They will no longer rank ads purely based on the bid per click. Now they are also taking popularity of ads into consideration. They claim that this change will allow people to focus on quality of ad, not budget. I have found the opposite to be true; it’s made the system less straightforward for those of us who were OK with taking the time to research terms, prices, and ad copy it takes away our competitive edge that previously made up for lack of deep pockets.
Google has always ranked ads this way. I suspect Google makes more money and so it makes sense for Overture to change too but almost consistently I have been able to build better campaigns for people on Overture versus Google. There are some terms where this hasn’t been true but overall it has.
Also there are times when you don’t want a blindly high click through rate such as when you run a broad ad with a geographic qualifier in the ad copy. For example you might buy “shoes” but include Minnesota in the ads so that only people in Minnesota click through the ads. This reduced click through rate will now impact the ranking of these ads.
So there’s my two cents on Overture and their latest change. I manage ads for a few folks on Overture and so far there hasn’t been a great difference but the real changes are slated to begin on Feb 5 so we’ll see if the ranking algorithm make a difference to the budget or click through rates.
Someone was just asking me about how they could create their own news web page. So I thought I’d write a Byte on web sites that let you create customized versions of your web site that you can use as your personal homepage.
My Yahoo (http://my.yahoo.com) let’s you pick and choose the news feeds that you would like to populate your personal pages. So, you can choose to get updates from various cities or news resources, weather reports, TV listings, stock quotes, comics, and more.
c|net My News (http://news.com.com) will filter news articles from their various publications to your personal web site based on keyword, topic, company or a combination of all three.
Individual.com (http://www.individual.com) will also let you filter news by publication, topic, company, and includes a search engine.
Google (http://www.google.com/ig) is a little different than the others in that along with the information the other services offered, their search engine is the center of the page and they include access to the personalize Google Calendar.
To set one of the pages above as your homepage on Explorer you can visit the specific web page, choose TOOLS, from your menu bar, select INTERNET OPTIONS from the dropdown menu, and then set the homepage in the dialog box.
Google (www.google.com) bought Blogger (www.blogger.com) a while ago – but so far users have not been forced to use the new Google features – that is until now. I just “upgraded” one of my blog accounts and I thought I’d share what I learned.
Things I liked:
- It’s easier for people who aren’t tech savvy to make changes to your blog template and they seem to offer more template options, or at least they’ve added various colors to templates.
- You can now “tag” your individual blog posts to make it easier for users to group any recurring topics on your blog. This is a nice perk that previously set WrodPress apart from Blogger as WordPress (another blog tool) has always offered this.
- You can now add some text that doesn’t change to your blog. You’ve always been able to add a brief blurb near your blog title – but now you can add text to other places as well.
Things I don’t like
- It’s not as easy to modify the html templates with a tool such as Dreamweaver.
- You have to set up a Google account to sign into your blog now. Be sure to use a Google account that will work with your blog. So, if you host a blog for your church, set up a Google account for your church rather than use your person account, because once you commit the blog to a Google account/owner you cannot change it.
- You can’t shift ownership of the blog to another team member.
- A team can share admin responsibilities for a blog, which is a nice feature. But now the original owner must remain the owner, which is a pain if the original owner moves away or on from a project. I suspect that they will find a way to change this as people are already complaining.
This year for New Year’s I’m bring up one of my very favorite online tools: PC Pitstop: www.pcpitstop.com
PC Pitstop provides a free tune up for your computer. You just need to click on the Tune Up for new members. You can register, but it’s not necessary. It takes a few minutes to run PC Pitstop and you may need to answer a few questions (such as what type of Internet connection do you have) but the tool with run a few tests and will tell you how your computer is running.
I love it. It will tell me what’s wrong and how to fix it. The answers aren’t too technical and they are generally pretty easy and quick to fix. Usually I will see a difference in how my computer runs after running PC Pitstop and making changes.
