Internet marketing made easy

It’s been a long search, but it paid off. We’re delighted to welcome Anna Maria Virzi as ClickZ’s new executive editor.

Posted by randfishIn our continuing series of coverage, I’m pleased to present one of the most talked-about, anticipated and dramatic sessions of the SES San Jose conference so far (though I heard that the session on click fraud was also extremely contentious).
For the past 2-3 years, Google (along with Yahoo! and MSN/Live) have hounded the micro-economy of paid link advertising and paid link networks at conferences, on blogs and, when possible, in the search results themselves. The basic argument that search engineers in general, and Matt Cutts in particular, has presented is that paid links represent manipulation and pollution in the index. The links are not "editorially vouching" for the quality and relevancy of the pages they point to, but due to the ulterior motive of financial compensation, adversely affect the quality of search results.
The panel for this session included:

At SES yesterday, Yahoo introduced some new features for Yahoo Search Marketing advertisers. They include adding PayPal as a payment option, the introduction of a quality score alert system that notifies individual advertisers when their score drops, and enhancing the ad creation process. The latter group of changes includes these items, taken verbatim from the company’s announcement:

Posted by JaneCoplandWhile most of the search world was partying with Rebecca attending sessions at SES San Jose, some of us were working away at our computers as though the industry’s biggest event wasn’t going on two states away. It was actually kind of awesome to be in such a quiet office, and it was equally pleasant not to have to pander to Rebecca’s dislike of certain food groups when we decided on where to eat lunch. However, in between enjoying meals that Rebecca and Matt won’t eat, I put the finishing touches on a 55-page premium article on Social Media Optimization.

Posted by randfishI’m taking a new approach with events and attempting to do more in-depth coverage of a couple of what I feel are the best, most interesting, most innovative or least discussed sessions at the conference. Since contextual advertising is an area where I have little to no experience, I found the panel fascinating - and certainly Microsoft’s announcement of a contextual ad product on the Microsoft network of sites made this panel even more intriguing. What follows are excerpts of interest from my notes, organized as best I could manage:
Panelists: Anton Konikoff from Acronym Media (BTW - this is very odd), Lora Parker from Range Media, Gopi Kallayi from Google AdSense and Natala Menezes from Microsoft AdCenter
Anton Konikoff was up first. He works with a lot of large companies, including Accenture, WebMD, Sirius, ADP, Nokia, Siemens, Four Seasons and many more. According to Anton, there are four prevalent types of online activity:

I did not plan on adding on to my previous Google AdSense competitive filter post but I encountered some weird bugs that everyone should know of, including Mr Google.
How To Accidentally Destroy Your Competitive Ad Filter List
You may run the risk of wiping out your entire competitive ad filter list when you REFRESH your browser in the event you see a screen like this:

Posted by OatmealI’ve just put the finishing touches on a new tool that’s exclusive to our premium members.  (Not a premium member? Read through to the bottom of this post - goodies are on the way).

Posted by randfishTo help keep the balance, I’ll shine some light on some of my favorite things about search conferences:

WPP Group, new owner of 24/7 Real Media, has released its 2007 Interim financials. Though the numbers provided by the firm don’t break out online revenues, the company did make note of media changes it’s dealing with and the effect they’re having on the firm and, in particular, its media operations. Specifically, the press release notes:

WPP Group, new owner of 24/7 Real Media, has released its 2007 Interim financials. Though the numbers provided by the firm don’t break out online revenues, the company did make note of media changes it’s dealing with and the effect they’re having on the firm and, in particular, its media operations. Specifically, the press release notes: