Natural Search Blog


Guerilla Marketing & Google Maps

My article on “Six Odd Tactics For Getting Ads Into Google Maps” posted today on Search Engine Land, and I believe many of my regular readers should find it moderately entertaining. The piece covers how some elements of guerrilla marketing have found their way into some Google Maps advertising patents, and also how some others have used creative means to get messages into Maps via “roofvertising”, “skywriting” and more.

Google in Digital Graffiti

Those familiar with Natural Search Blog may remember some of my similar past work here outlining laser graffiti ads on buildings, roofvertising, marriage proposals in Google Maps, “earth art” geoglyph ads, and sponsoring town names as an Ultimate Local SEO tactic.

It’s not surprising to see guerilla marketing tactics finding their way into Google Maps. Not only does Google itself seek to introduce disruptive technology innovations, but I expect that as Satellite and Aerial photos may get more frequently updated in such interfaces we’ll be bound to see a whole lot more efforts from people trying to get messages conveyed through the Maps interfaces.

The real question I’m left with, is if Google resells ad space on pictures of people’s rooftops and billboards, would they owe anything back to the original property owners?!?

How To Breathe Life Into A Lacklustre PPC Campaign

PPC or Pay Per Click campaigns are a sure fire way of attracting traffic to your website almost instantaneously without the rigors of an SEO campaign that is required to bring your site on top of the SERPs. The most important thing to be aware of when it comes to a PPC campaign is understanding the rules to play the Adwords game.

Google’s policy of serving relevant ads in response to user queries coupled with complex factors like quality score can make Adwords a minefield for a novice or intermediate level practitioner so much so that a lot of money is coughed up to elicit a poor ROI (Return on Investment) or not the best bang for your buck in layman terms.

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Quova Awarded Patent for Improved Geotargeting

Quova Logo - Location MattersQuova recently announced that they were awarded a patent for various methods which improve geotargeting accuracy and capability. My understanding is that Quova has been using these methods for quite some time already, prior to receiving the patent.

Here’s Quova’s description of the innovations:

“Quova’s newly added patent describes a method for determining the geographic location of an Internet user based upon combining trace routes, user registration information, host names with textual patterns that reveal geolocation information and Internet Service Provider (ISP) service area information. These trace routes describe the pathways by which data moves through the Internet. Each node or ‘hop’ in the trace route is identified by an IP address. These interconnected nodes can be used to recreate the topology of the Internet. Each geolocation can then be assigned to these IP addresses in order to determine the location of each node, up to and including the end user’s IP address and the geolocation of that end user.”

I previously have written about Quova in my extensive article, (more…)

Harnessing The Power of Social Media In Business

Social media is an exciting medium offering tonnes of opportunities to you, as a business owner, to engage the masses in your marketing efforts and get great results for your efforts.

It is a double edged sword and if done right, you will glow on the winner’s podium with a great name for your product/service/company in the online space reaping rich inbound links to your site from a multitude of powerful and trusted domains. Done wrong, you could end up a social pariah in cyberspace with a bad reputation and poor record of integrity attached to your name and company’s product/service.

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Cleaning up the Retail Site Navigation Mess

Beware: If you are an online retailer that has implemented “attribute-based” or “guided navigation” schemes to make it easier for your shoppers to filter your products, stop what you’re doing, read my Search Engine Land article that published today.

The technology may be great for users and conversion rates – but you can expect a lump of coal in your stocking from Google this Christmas. Find out why, what to do next: http://searchengineland.com/080904-175800.php

Brian

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NebuAd Aborts Big Brother

NebuAdThe Washington Post today reported that NebuAd has halted plans to deploy the deep-packet inspection tracking of internet users for their advertising platform. I’d earlier predicted that consumer sensitivity about NebuAd could derail their business plans, and I reported how lawmakers pressured and ISP not to share data with NebuAd.

Meanwhile, Congress is examining issues around exploiting user data for behavioral marketing and targeted advertising, and the heavy uncertainty in the air would make NebuAd’s entire business modle appear to be a very unstable foundation. (more…)

Print Yellow Pages Usage On Decline Or Not?

Walking FingersMy article on how the “Yellow Pages Usage Stats Are Likely Wrong” went up earlier at Search Engine Land, and the details I highlight in it provide some strong circumstantial evidence that this year’s earlier industry statistics stating that print YP book usage hadn’t dropped over the year previous are likely incorrect.

As I point out, those statistics were all based on telephone polling, and those polls missed having representative samples of cell phone only households, according to their published methodology. Various research groups and government agencies have been saying that this is a significant chunk of the population — anywhere from 13.6%, growing to as much as 25% by the end of this year. (more…)

Yellow Pages Guerilla Ad Campaign

I was speaking at the Search Engine Strategies (“SES”) Conference in Toronto a couple of weeks ago, and was impressed by the YellowPages.ca booth in the exhibit hall:

YellowPages.ca booth at SES Toronto Conference

YellowPages.ca Search GraphI’ve seen other, equally-large booths for online yellow pages companies, but this one seemed particularly attention-getting and inviting. The glowing yellow desk and the simple design made the thing very friendly-looking, and the geek in me was drawn to the near-real-time search volume graph they had playing up on one screen. (more…)

Asian & Chinese PPC & SEM – Netconcepts Marketer Allen Qu to Speak at SMX China @ Timev

Allen Qu, Netconcepts SEM AnalystMany of you know that Netconcepts not only operates out of Madison, Wisconsin, but we also have offices in New Zealand, and we do quite a bit of internet marketing and website design work in the still-nascent Asian and Oceanic markets.

For those interested in our work in SEO & SEM in Asia, one of Netconcepts’ marketers, Allen Qu, will be speaking at the upcoming SMX China @ Timev conference in Xiamen, China during April 18 & 19.

I had a chance to visit with Allen back in February, and I can tell you he is extremely savvy in managing our client’s PPC campaigns that are running in Chinese search engines such as Baidu and Google China. Allen will be speaking at SMX China on a panel focussed on PPC ad management, although he is also expert in natural search marketing as well.

Chinese and Asian search markets are considered to be the new frontier in terms of areas for greatest potential future revenue and search audience growth.

If you’re interested in contacting our New Zealand office from the US, their morning office hours overlap US afternoon hours on Mondays through Thursdays. Our NZ office can be phoned at: +64 9 476-4601

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Do CueCats Have 9 Lives?!? Google Resurrects a Bad Idea

For those of us who’ve been around the internet biz for a while, there’s often a feeling of deja vu or “been there, done that!” Thus we have that sensation today when we see this article from Silicon Alley Insider which seems to gush just a bit in its praise of these cute, “new” barcodes that Google is resurrecting in some print ads that can be scanned camera phones so people can easily connect up instantaneously to associated websites.

The article fails to mention the last time this sad concept was foisted on the world. Remember the company, Digital Convergence, with their various “CueCat” devices that allowed people to do this exact same thing?

The CueCat (more…)

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