OMNI Ezine Archives
Please find the first four issues of OMNI listed below. The next four issues are to be found here. Please contact us for further information about using this content or getting us to develop content for you.
Online Marketing New Ideas: Issue
4 February 2004
Welcome to issue 4. This edition features an
interview given to OMNI by Karen Salamon, Marketing Director with
Overture.
Karen joined Overture in May 2002 as Marketing Director and her role has now
expanded to include
1. It seems like a long
time ago since Bill Gross first pitched the idea of a search engine solely
focused on search. Can you outline for our readers some of the milestones that
have taken Overture to be one of the biggest players in the global search engine
arena?
Overture was founded as
search destination site, GoTo.com, in September 1997 by Bill Gross’ Idealab. In
June 1998, the company launched its Pay-For-Performance search service to enable
advertisers to bid for search result placement on specific keywords relevant to
their businesses. One year later, the company completed its NASDAQ IPO.
Since the launch of Overture
UK in November 2000, Overture has expanded its European presence to include
Germany and France in 2002, Italy in May 2003, the Netherlands and Spain in
September 2003 and Austria and Switzerland in October 2003. In Asia, Overture
successfully launched its business in the fast-growing Japanese market in the
fourth quarter of 2002, and launched in South Korea in April 2003.
On October 7, 2003 Yahoo!
Inc. acquired Overture, which now operates as a wholly owned subsidiary of
Yahoo!. Overture currently has 100,000 advertisers worldwide and works with key
distribution partners including MSN,
AOL, Yahoo!,
Lycos, Tiscali and
Freeserve.
2. Pay for Performance (PFP)
is now established as a staple part of every online marketing agency’s pitch –
but do you think that the market still needs to be educated as to the benefits
of PFP?
It’s certainly true that
awareness of Pay-For-Performance has increased dramatically over the last few
years – particularly amongst the agency sector.
In contrast, awareness of
the PFP model amongst SMEs could still be stronger. PFP has incredible benefits
for smaller businesses in terms of scalability, payment by results and the
ability to measure return on investment – therefore, further education is needed
for these companies to understand that PFP is a means of marketing to customers
with no huge costs up-front.
3. What, in your opinion,
is the critical driver of a company getting involved in a PFP campaign?
Knowing what a company wants
to achieve through PFP is the critical driver, in my opinion. In other words,
why are you driving customers to your Web site? To buy products? To get quotes?
To research later purchases offline?
The only way to measure the
effectiveness of a PFP campaign is by knowing, at the beginning of the
campaign, what the ultimate objective is. Once this is known, you need to ensure
your Web site allows you to fulfil these objectives once the lead is driven
there. For example, if your objective of a PFP campaign is to increase online
sales, is your site easy to navigate and user-friendly once a customer clicks on
your link? If not, you won’t be able to efficiently measure how many sales
conversions are resulting from customers clicking through to your site.
4. Can you give us a few
key stats about how the European market has performed for Overture – and how
Overture has delivered for the market?
Overture has a strong
presence throughout Europe, and is currently present in the following markets:
UK, Germany, France, Italy, Netherlands, Spain, Austria and Switzerland.
Overture has strong distribution partnerships within each of these countries,
reaching 85% of UK Internet users; 91% of French Internet users and 72% of
Spanish Internet users. Key customers within Europe include
British Airways; ebay;
L’Oreal; Renault;
American Express and
IBM.
5. 2003 was a very busy
year for Overture on the acquisition front with both AltaVista and FAST coming
into the fold – what was the strategic significance of acquiring these two key
players?
The acquisitions of
AltaVista and the Web search unit of
FAST, were strategically significant to
Overture in building the Web’s strongest advanced search capability for our
affiliate partners and offering our customers access to new products and sources
of distribution to drive additional customer leads. Through this combination,
Overture would be able to offer a full suite of paid placement, paid inclusion
and algorithmic Web search products and services to syndicate to portals, ISPs
and destination sites.
In addition, Overture could
utilise both the FAST and AltaVista Web properties to advance the company’s
product development process. FAST’s technology showcase site, AlltheWeb.com,
could be used to test and experiment with advanced approaches in search. At the
same time, Overture could use the AltaVista.com site, which operates on a larger
scale, to refine implementations for new products and improve presentation to
consumers.
6. What will be the main
differences for Overture customers and users resulting from the acquisition by
Yahoo! Inc.?
Since the Yahoo!
acquisition, Overture customers should have seen little or no change - Overture
operates its business as a wholly owned subsidiary of Yahoo! and so has a
continued focus on building its network of customers and affiliates. The recent
renewal of multi-year, European search contracts with MSN and Wanadoo Group
(including Freeserve) is testament to this.
In the future, Overture
customers can look forward to the availability of innovative new products and
services. We are excited about future opportunities that Overture’s
complementary offerings can add to Yahoo!’s already diverse portfolio of
services for small businesses and believe this combination will enable us to
offer our customers the most diverse set of integrated online marketing
solutions available.
7. There is considerable
consolidation in the search engine marketplace over the last year – how will
this pan out for the customer?
This can only be good news
for customers. Online marketing solutions will continue to be competitive with
all other forms of advertising by demonstrating value for money and low customer
acquisition costs. Consolidation should mean that more value-added solutions
become available and that customers will be able to benefit more and more from
the ‘one-stop-shop’ effect – using less of their time to manage individual
campaigns and so gaining more time to get on with doing business.
An IPO for Google this year
would be a positive event for the search industry – and for Overture. With the
inevitable media frenzy surrounding such news comes increased public awareness
of search and commercial search in particular. In addition, it will of course be
very interesting to gain an accurate insight into advertising revenues for the
entire search market.
9. Can you give our
readers a sneak preview of any new product offerings coming down the line – oh,
go on, please?
Well, we’ve just launched
enhancements to our contextual advertising product, Content Match. Now, Overture
customers can directly control costs for each Content Match listing and pause
individual Content Match listings whenever they choose.
The new version of Conversion Counter,
Overture’s free conversion-tracking tool, was also launched in January. Overture
customers can now gain deeper insight into their account’s performance by
tracking their search listings from click through to conversion.
Over the coming months,
readers should look out for announcements in local search and mobile – two
really hot areas in search that we’re very excited about.
10. Can you give our
readers, most of whom will have a specific interest, into Overture’s decision to
headquarter its European operation in Dublin, Ireland?
Dublin was chosen as the
location of choice for the headquarters of Overture’s European operations
because of the opportunity to employ a multi-cultural workforce. The editorial
teams for each of our European markets are based here (France, Germany, Spain,
Italy, Netherlands), meaning a significant requirement for native/fluent
speakers. For this reason, Dublin appeared to be the obvious choice, thanks to
the international nature of the employment market.
11. Are there any other
expansion plans envisaged for Yahoo/Overture in 2004?
Within the next few months,
Overture will be launching throughout Scandinavia (Sweden, Denmark, Finland and
Norway) and also in Australia.
12. Do you think 2004
will bring online advertising back to the dizzy heights of the dotcom boom?
The ‘dotcom boom’ has rather
negative connotations these days - we all reminisce about the fantastic
halo effect of growth in the online industry in the late 90s and early 2000, but
when marketers analysed spend during this period, a discernable return was not
evident. The market crashed and suddenly ‘online’ became a dirty word.
The online industry has now
passed its ‘fad’ era where companies wondered how they could achieve revenue
from dancing hamsters. The business survivors from the Internet boom of the late
90s and early 2000 are profitable companies, with strong business models –
companies with strong business models like eBay, Yahoo! and Amazon. Paid
placement search is another example of a successful Internet business model.
With other online and offline advertising campaigns, costs are incurred before a
single lead is even generated. Yet in paid placement, businesses set the price
for each lead and are only obligated to pay when a potential customer lands on
their Web site.
13. Finally, Karen, what
are your own thoughts about where the whole online advertising space is headed?
There is only one word for
it – it’s getting bigger! Online advertising and paid search are both growing at
an astonishing rate (a staggering annual rise of 85% from 2002, according to the
latest IAB/PwC AdSpend Report), due to the flexibility and measurability of the
medium. It’s a very exciting time to be part of this industry, with new local
advertising and mobile solutions becoming more widespread, and companies
becoming far more creative about how they market their businesses. I can’t think
of another industry I’d rather be in right now!
Next Issue
Next month I will be featuring a special on Search Engine Visibility - what does it mean, what are the ways to measure it and what should you look out for.
<Shameless Plug>
Readers of OMNI may be interested to know that my latest book 10 Technologies Every Executive Should Know, co-authored with Dermot Mc Cormack, has just been published. It is available to buy on Amazon.com or directly from my website (the preferred method please). Just go to the payments section to order a copy (or copies).
<End of Shameless Plug>
If you do buy the book,
thank you. If not talk to you in the next issue of OMNI.
Fergal
Copyright © 2004
You may reproduce this ezine in its entirety provided a source credit is provided in the form of a link to www.fergalobyrne.com
XML for the
New Year - Part 2 of a two part XML special
Welcome
to the first OMNI of 2004, following on from
our last XML special, which detailed the technology
behind XML. This issue will focus on the
application of XML to online marketing. If you want to beef up before
reading this Part 1 is
available online.
So what about online marketing?
XML
will make an appearance when you consider your online marketing requirements.
Search engines support many different methods of adding pages to their indices.
Each submission method can be very effective under certain circumstances. All of
the main search engines provide what is called a Trusted Feed or XML Feed as
part of their business advertising services. These XML feeds essentially let
large websites stream many pages into their databases. XML feeds are
particularly useful for sites with a large number of dynamically generated
pages, from a database for example, that requires traffic to these deeper pages.
XML feeds are really geared for sites with one
or more of the following characteristics;
Dynamic Pages from a site that
produces long, multi-argument URLs;
Catalog or e-commerce pages
whose content changes frequently; A
large number of pages that spiders have difficulty indexing
An XML feed is unique because of the way its
data is submitted to search engines. Along with a URL, engines accept
customised titles, descriptions, and meta data. This information helps
engines know the exact page address without having to crawl the site, and it
helps them determine where the pages should be ranked in their indices. While
editorial guidelines apply, the ability to input customized data offers sites a
great deal of flexibility in the submission process.
Let’s look at one company that offers XML feeds:
Quigo
is a company that promotes websites and includes XML feeds as part of its
product offering. Indeed, they seem to be promoting themselves very heavily in
this area – as part of the research for this article I simply type in lots of
variations of XML and XML Feeds in Google and Quigo showed up in the organic and
Adword listing for all the variations – sometimes they were the only listing.
Good for them. Does this make them an authority on the subject? No. But their
website does give a clear and precise explanation of what XML feeds are in
relation to online marketing.
Quigo’s
proprietary technology crawls your website, extracting what they consider
relevant product parameters - such as product
name, price, description and so on, from your
product database, formatting it into XML feeds ready for submission to
the leading search engines. Quigo uses what
they refer to as patent-pending technology to
discover hundreds of keywords relevant to your products to increase traffic
through paid inclusion programs. They will
create XML feeds including page-specific titles and descriptions for all leading
paid inclusion programs (Inktomi, AltaVista, FAST, AskJeeves, LookSmart) and
pay-for-placement engines (Overture, Google Adwords, FindWhat.com, Kanoodle).
These XML feeds go beyond the HTML tags that we discussed in the last issue –
the XML feed allows other parameter tags to be developed – hence not restricting
the feed to the restrictive HTML meta tags.
So that’s what one of the
SEO companies can do for you but what about the search engines themselves. I did
a trawl of all the main players and was disappointed to see that none of them
particularly push XML feeds to a great degree. I had to search deep into the
Business Services sections of their sites to find what I was looking for. Why is
that? It’s not obvious and I can only surmise that the service is geared at such
a small percentage of their customer base (sites with over 500 pages or more
usually) that they go through the agency channel much more effectively. The one
that scored highest from a “findability” point of view was AltaVista (now owned
by Overture, of course, who are in turn owned by Yahoo! Inc.) so I am going to
reward them greatly by focusing of their offering:
AltaVista's Trusted Feed program (another name
for XML feeds) allows advertisers to significantly improve their presence on
AltaVista Search. Partners (that’s you, me or your online marketing agency) can
determine which pages are included in the database that powers AltaVista's web
search, and you can specify detailed page information including titles,
descriptions and keywords. These elements are used to determine how the pages
are ranked on the search result pages, as well as how the page listing appears.
You can provide information to AltaVista via an
XML feed, which can be updated weekly (some engines claim to do this in real
time but when I probed deeper they were reluctant to say how often they refresh
– AltaVista is the only one who came out and said it). This ensures that
partners' listings are fresh and accurate, on a weekly basis.
Here’s the catch - AltaVista's Trusted Feed
program is reserved for partners that submit more than 500 pages. If you only
want to submit fewer pages, then its AltaVista’s Express Inclusion for you …
So what will this cost me?
All of the sites promote their Trusted Feed
service on a CPC (cost per click) basis. So some research needs to be done on
your keywords to ascertain if they are within your budget. Most of the engines
provide some form of keyword estimator so it is not a major chore. If you use an
online marketing agency they will be happy to do this for you, I am sure.
Remember, all of the engines are providing this as a business cost, for sites
with many pages so expect to pay business rates. If you have a smaller website
then the paid offerings of Overture or Google Adwords services are more
appropriate to you.
Trusted feed search engine submission programs
are priced on a pay per click (PPC) model, with costs typically ranging from 30
to 50 cents or more per click, depending on the engine and the vertical market
of your business. For competitive terms, this can be a very cost-effective
alternative to traditional PPC campaigns such as Overture or Google Adwords.
Unlike traditional PPC campaigns, however, trusted feed submission does not
guarantee specific placement on the page. Instead, rank and placement are
determined by a number of factors, including the effectiveness of the custom XML
data, amount of competing pages, and other algorithmic criteria.
I hope
this issue proved useful to you and your online marketing exploits. As usual I
welcome feedback on the content or on any area you would like to see covered. I
have a defined content plan for three months ahead at any time but can be
flexible if someone has a specific request that I believe will be of interest to
the list.
Next
Issue
Next
month I will be featuring an interview with Karen Salamon of Overture UK. It
promises to be an illuminating interview and provide you with some insights into
where Overture is going since their acquisition by Yahoo! Inc.
Until
then, good luck.
Fergal
Copyright © 2004
You may reproduce this ezine in its entirety provided a source credit is provided in the form of a link to www.fergalobyrne.com
Online Marketing New Ideas: Issue 2 Volume 1 December 2003
XML for XMAS - Part 1 of a two part XML special
This issue will concentrate on bringing you up to speed with the basics of XML. Part 2 (in January 2004) will focus on the application of XML to online marketing.
XML
stands for Extensible Mark-up Language. It is essentially aimed at
improving the functionality of the web by providing more flexible and adaptable
information identification. It is called extensible because it is not a fixed
format like HTML (a single, predefined mark-up language).
XML has been heralded as the next important
internet technology, the next step following HTML, and the natural and worthy
companion to the Java programming language itself. Thankfully, the major players
– Sun, Microsoft and their ilk – have been intimately involved in the
development (and the deployment) of XML. Even more thankfully, they do not own
XML – is it owned by everyone and no one vendor can claim it as their real
estate.
What
you really need to understand is that XML is just another of what are called
Standardized General Mark-up Languages (SGML) – basically languages that
define the way data is presented. HTML, the ubiquitous web language is an SGML
language. However, HTML is really just a clever presentation language –
effectively only a formatting language. It is constrained by a rigid selection
of tags that tell a browser how to render a piece of code on your computer
screen. These tags are cast in stone and cannot be tampered with. XML lets you
develop your own tags AND share them with others if you so wish. This is the
beauty of XML.
Still
confused about SGML and all these mark-up languages? Well don’t be. Even
before HTML the airline industry had a mark-up language for its own use.
Remember SGML is just a way of configuring languages for a specific reason –
and HTML and XML are subsets of this.
Although
XML is a member of the SGML coterie, just like HTML, it offers a lot more.
That’s the good news. The downside is that is it not uniformly supported by
the major browsers – as of yet. When this happens expect to be bombarded with
all things XML and to get to talk about it a lot more with your web designers
and systems integrators.
A brief overview of some of HTML's Problems
HTML is an excellent presentation tool. It has
enabled coders and non-coders alike to develop and publish web pages. However,
HTML is easy for us non-coders because it is NOT actually a code. If you have
used HTML you will see that the pages are defined using <> tags – and
all these do is tell the browser whether to put something in bold, or in a
paragraph or in a certain type of heading. You cannot, for example, tell the
browser to do something with the piece of text depending on inputs from the
user. It is merely a presentation and formatting tool. It is not a piece of
software like C++ or Java.
So, by that very definition, HTML is limited in
what it can achieve. This is one of its problems. Web developers and systems
integrators wanted to do more online but were constrained by HTML. Let us review
a few of the issues that crop up when using HTML:
- HTML
does not necessarily reveal anything about the information to which HTML
tags are applied. For example, we know that <h2>Cocoon</h2>
has a definite, predictable appearance in a web browser, but is the word
Cocoon a XML-based web development framework, a movie with that
much-maligned genius Steve Gutenberg, an ultra trendy bar in Dublin, or a
home for a would-be butterfly? HTML does not usually tell. Not its fault –
it just doesn’t have the power to imbue this information. HTML tag names
do not describe what content is. They only imply how content appears. This
is a fundamental underperformance of HTML.
- As
mentioned earlier, HTML has a fixed tag set. You cannot
extend it to create new tags that are meaningful and useful to you and
others. Only the W3C (World Wide Web Consortium) has the power to do this
and they have better things to attend to (like XML).
- In
the early days of the internet, web browsers were actually viewed as
potential application platforms. However, technology like Java needs
more power in the engine than HTML can offer to deliver on that vision. With
HTML as the data standard, web-based applications rely heavily on CGI
scripts, at the server, to process the data in web pages. This has the
downside of contributing to internet traffic and makes the web slow for many
users.
The above points are not intended to denigrate HTML, but merely to establish the perspective that some XML's developers hold.
XML's goals for the Internet
As internet usage soared people did more and
more clever things with the existing HTML they had at their disposal. Some
developers, implementors, and users of HTML's parent technology – SGML -
looked on knowing that there was a more powerful entity that could be developed.
These individuals and their companies had already invested heavily in SGML. They
knew that with SGML they could govern the structures and describe the contents
of their documents and of the information of which the documents were composed.
Neat.
SGML, unlike HTML, provides its users with an
extensible tag set, and it establishes the rules by which documents are created.
SGML yields sets of tags, as HTML is a set of tags, for characterizing what
pieces of information are. SGML experts and structured information systems
people believed that SGML technology could enrich and revolutionize the web in
some key ways.
XML has some lofty goals. It will take
widespread adoption of this technology before these aspirations come to
fruition. But XML can achieve this because it is not, in fact, some obscure
coding language. Remember, XML is actually a “metalanguage” - a language for
describing other languages - which lets you design your own customized mark-up
languages for limitless different types of documents. XML can only do this
because it's written in SGML, the international standard metalanguage for text mark-up
systems (officially known as ISO 8879).
So what about online marketing?
You may have heard about XML feeds, or Trusted Feeds, as part of your online marketing exploits? Well, I will be revisiting this, in detail, in January. So please make yourself comfortable with the concepts of XML and I will explain its usefulness in the area of online marketing in the next issue.
Until next month, let me wish you all a great Xmas and a prosperous 2004.
Cheers
Fergal
Copyright © 2003 Fergal O'Byrne.
You may reproduce this ezine in its entirety provided a source credit is provided in the form of a link to www.fergalobyrne.com
Online Marketing New Ideas (OMNI) Issue 1 - November 03
Welcome to OMNI, my monthly ezine discussing new developments and ideas in the online marketing arena. In this issue I would like to discuss the latest developments in relation to MSN developing its own search engine technology.
In my view there will only be three major, power players in the search engine arena by mid 2004. Google, Yahoo! and Microsoft's MSN will be the Big Three controlling 95% of all search engine traffic. Between them they garner over a phenomenal 120 million visitors per month, according to the people at Nielsen/NetRatings. I brand the directory Yahoo! here as an engine as, in case any of you email me in anger, they will own Overture by then. Yahoo! already owns Inktomi, in a deal closed earlier this year. And when you consider that Overture bought AltaVista and FAST (alltheweb.com), you can pretty much guess where this is all leading.
Through their extensive networks of partners it may appear to the plain man on the web that there is a multitude of players out there offering different search options and products. This is the soap powder scenario - there are a few big players offering essentially the same products just packaged differently. Bizarrely, Yahoo still takes its search results from Google and MSN uses Overture and Inktomi results in its mix. How long will this all last though?
So, let me recap. Yahoo! have cemented the purchase of Overture. MSN is making overtures (apology for the pun) about developing its own search bot. Google is planning an IPO - firmly denied by Brin, Page and company - making it all the more believable. When the lowly ezine writer guy, like me, is talking Google IPOs then its time to take it seriously.
So what are the implications of MSN joining the search engine fray?
Up until now, MSN has taken its search technology from a number of sources, including Overture, which it declined to buy. However, it has been stealthily pushing out its own search software. It seems Microsoft is very serious about developing its own search technology. Many sceptics argue that they will simply buy out one of the other two players but they appear to want to be the third tine of the search engine fork, hungry for their slice of the billion dollar online ad cake.
There is another rumour that Microsoft will buy Ask Jeeves, mainly to get their hands on the young pretender Teoma. Ask Jeeves bought Teoma, which was hotly tipped to be the next big thing, but thus far it has been like a candle in Goggle's wind tunnel. So, this leaves MSN having to deal with the two big players and being isolated from the coalface. This is not the way Bill Gates operates - he usually responds by buying all the competition or developing a serious competitor.
I believe the real issue here is not merely the search issue. Google has cleverly developed the Google Toolbar, which is fast becoming a part of most people's Microsoft browser. Is there not a possibility that Google could develop a more powerful toolbar tool that could search the web and your PC? Imagine the impact - Google can already search billions of web pages and documents, including PDFs. If they could also provide you with the capability to search all of your own network, would that be something interesting. Another interesting facet of the Toolbar is the ability to bloke pop-up adverts - a boon for surfers but bad for the banner advert agencies. Maybe they will be encouraged to spend more on Google Adwords in future.
I think Google will be the real force that MSN will have to deal with. Yahoo! to going to have to invest a huge amount into integrating the Overture and Inktomi technologies. Google has it all already. And it has the brand, the audience and the chutzpah to take on Microsoft. Interesting times lay ahead of us. I will revisit this issue early in 2004 when we get a good peep behind the Google kimono.
I want to encourage you to provide feedback about any points raised in this ezine. The best comments will be featured on my website. Simply reply to info@fergalobyrne.com quoting the Issue Number and we'll take it from there.
Until next month, good luck with your online marketing exploits.
Fergal
Next Issue
In the next issue I will be discussing the use of visibility indexes as a measure of how "visible" a website is in search engines. We will look at a number of available indexes and show you how we developed one of our own.
Copyright © 2003 Fergal O'Byrne.
You may reproduce this ezine in its entirety provided a source credit is provided in the form of a link to www.fergalobyrne.com
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