The question all along has been – “how will Twitter monetize?” and it looks like we have at least one answer today. According to an article in MediaPost, the release of a Twitter ad platform is “imminent” and we’ll likely signs of it on our Twitter feeds within a month.

According to the article, Anamitra Banerji told MediaPost after a meeting on monday that “we are working on an ad platform, but it’s only in the test phase.”

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Banerji assured MediaPost that Twitter would make it “explicity clear” that a post was from an advertiser and not a regular users. The Word of Mouth Marketing Association recently released a guide for companies to use, suggesting they use #spon, #paid, and #samp hashtags to indicate their relationship to a product being tweeted about. Banerji said this was simply a good work around, but that Twitter would take a different approach.

As opposed to someone tweeting about a product, these ads will be owned and operated by Twitter, much in the same way Google offers its AdSense advertising. Banerji did, however, offer a statement that separated the Twitter ad platform from others:

“We don’t think of ourselves as a Web site — essentially it’s a platform,” Banerji said. “We don’t really control the ads or the way the tweets are viewed and then consumed. We are completely open around other people innovating around us. Ultimately, publishers should have choice. But the one area of concern for us — and that’s if bad ads get identified in Twitter — it’s a problem for us in the long term. So, we should do whatever we can to encourage positive behavior.”

While the article says we should see signs in about a month, we can only wonder how long it will be. If you remember, Twitter announced their “hovercards” feature at the beginning of this month, but most of us are still waiting to see the feature pop up on our own pages.

This one, however, looks like it might be around by the beginning of next month, according to GigaOm. They report that “one source in the media industry” says that Twitter may launch the ad network during South By Southwest Interactive, which begins in Austin on March 12.

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AdGooroo, a competitive intelligence agency, has released a new report, which indicates that there as has been a decrease in active advertisers for Google, despite projected Q4 gains.

"Google experienced a quality purge this quarter and banned what we believe to be more than 30,000 advertisers, accounting for about 5.3 percent of its active advertiser base," said AdGooroo Founder and CEO Rich Stokes. "While this typically signals a negative impact on revenues, AdGooroo also tracked increased competition for ad placement, resulting in higher ad prices for Google and unusually high clickthrough rates. Google seems to be taking advantage of a strong Q4 to make some quality improvements."

The report maintains that ad coverage, which has been steadily climbing for the past 12 months took a sudden dive in December, dropping nearly 10% — from 5.48 ads per keyword in November down to 4.97 in December.

In the report, the firm notes that the fourth quarter has traditionally been strong for Google, and expects this to be the case again this year. "This seasonal improvement has less to do with total search query volume (which historically is about the same as November), and more with increased competition for ad placement (higher ad prices) and unusually high clickthrough rates," says AdGooroo.

Here are some interesting graphs from the report:

Other interesting information in the report includes lists of the top 25 advertisers on Google, Yahoo, and Bing, and the most expensive keywords on each of these search engines. These are based on the total number of recorded first-page ad impressions, and doesn’t necessarily reflect total ad spend. You can check out the report in its entirety here (it’s complimentary).
 

Related Articles:

> Consumers Expected to Spend $6.2 Billion on Mobile Apps in 2010

> Click Fraud Rate Spikes In Q4

> Bing Makes Out Well In Search Spend Report

The estimates for cloud computing can make you wonder sometimes about what to believe. Analyst firms and it looks like investment houses, can be notorious for wild estimates about market sizes.

So we have to wonder about the estimates from Merrill Lynch, which is estimating the cloud computing market to reach $160 billion by 2011.The estimate includes $95 billion in business and productivity applications.

Whoa! That makes cloud computing one of the fastest growing markets in the world.

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But Merrill Lynch is not alone in its lofty estimates. Earlier this year, Gartner pegged the market at $150 billion by 2013.

In their estimate, Gartner included Google Ad Words estimates in their estimates. This seems sketchy at best. Here’s what Gartner analyst Lydia Leong wrote back in May:

“Obviously, one argue whether or not it’s valid to include advertising revenue, but a key point that should not be missed is that in the trend towards the consumerization of IT, it is the advertiser that often implicitly pays for the consumer’s use of an IT service, rather than the consumer himself. Advertising revenue is a significant component of the overall market, part of the “cloud” phenomenon even if you don’t necessarily think of it as “computing”.

What’s at risk is making cloud computing totally irrelevant. How can corporate IT departments make sense of the market when it appears that cloud computing is essentially tied to anything connected to the Internet?

But then you need to look at the dynamics in play. IT is built on legacy systems, custom, built to order environments. Cloud computing provides a level of automation.

From the PriceWaterhouseCoopers summer Technology Forecast:

“Legacy IT soaks up much of the available IT budget and is a primary barrier to IT responsiveness and overall business agility.”

The report goes on to say that cloud will be necesssary for automating the world of IT:

“…IT must adopt an architecture that creates loose coupling between the IT infrastructure and application workloads. It also must modernize and automate IT’s own internal business processes for provisioning, managing, and orchestrating infrastructure resources.”

In other words, cloud computing will be huge but to call it a $160 billion market seems like a form of hype that can lead to all kinds of issues. It’s almost reminiscent of the dot-com bubble.

And look what happened there.

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A study from a couple of NYU Stern professors has found that organic search engine results can play a direct role in whether or not a paid listing is clicked. Basically, if this research is any indication, if your business has both a paid result and an organic result appear at the same time, you have a better chance of your paid result getting clicked than if the organic result had not appeared.

Seen better CTRs when paid and organic listings are present? Tell us about it.

Professors Anindya Ghose and Sha Yang have highlighted the following findings:

- On average, the impact of organic listings on paid advertising is 3.5 times stronger than vice-versa, possibly because of the tendency of consumers to trust organic listings more than paid ads.

- The positive association between paid and organic listings increases advertisers’ profits by at least 6.15% when compared to profits in the absence of either of them. The positive association is strongest when advertiser-specific keywords are used and weakest when brand-specific and generic keywords are used.

- Click-through rates, conversion rates and total revenues are higher when both paid and organic listings are present simultaneously than when paid search ads are absent.

- The combined click-through rates are 5.1% higher when paid and organic listings are present simultaneously than when only the organic listings are present.

- The combined conversion rate increases 11.7% when paid and organic listings are present simultaneously than when organic listings alone are present.

- Paid search advertising drives up to 54% of total revenue growth.

The professors used "a unique panel dataset of consumer responses to keyword ads on Google" to conduct their research. The complete findings from the study are evidently available in a paper entitled "Analyzing the Relationship between Organic and Sponsored Search Advertising: Positive, Negative or Zero Interdependence?" It’s 52 pages long.

"These findings have important implications for the incentives of search engines to strategically modify the rankings of their organic search listings in order to boost their revenues from paid search advertisements," says Professor Ghose.

Ghose’s point is an interesting one. Nobody’s making any accusations here, but would search engines tweak organic results specifically with the goal of increasing the performance of paid results, and bringing in more revenue?

Some think the idea is absurd. For example, one WebProNews reader commented:

No additional CPC is incurred when an organic listing is present, and the CPC certainly does not change depending on the organic listing’s position. The PPC auctioning process has nothing to do with the organic SERPs.

Lastly, manipulating the organic SERPs in order to charge more for PPC clicks is cutting your own throat, from an SE perspective. In effect, telling advertisers: "You got a better organic position, therefore you will be charged more for your PPC clicks." Under which business model does this make sense? Exactly none. (respond here.)

Even if a search engine did engage in such a practice, it is highly unlikely that anybody would know about it. I think the larger point is still just that it pays to optimize your site for organic listings, even if you are paying for listings. This may seem like common sense, but it is easy to dismiss the time and effort that go into an optimized site if you think you can just buy your way to clicks. What are your thoughts on the subject? Comment here.

Related Articles:

> Google and Heineken Study Search for Branding

> Report: Paid Search Spend Up 10%

> Search Ads Convert Better with Display

Google announced that it is testing a new AdWords feature called AdWords Comparison Ads. These are ads that let users compare multiple offers from the same advertiser that are relevant to the user.

Google says the feature is part of its continuing effort to make ads more relevant and useful to users and help advertisers reach the people who are most interested in their products and services.

"AdWords uses a host of targeting and relevancy signals to determine the best ads for each query. However, sometimes a user’s query doesn’t provide enough information for us to confidently predict what they want," explains Dan Friedman of Google’s Inside AdWords Crew. "Take, for example, users who search for "mortgage." Do they want a new home loan or a refinance? Do they want a fixed rate or an adjustable rate loan? Comparison Ads improves the ad experience on Google.com by letting users specify exactly what they are looking for and helping them quickly compare relevant offers side by side."

If a user clicks a promotion, they are taken to a page with more detailed, sponsored results. There they can choose from the offers listed on the page or refine their search further. If a user finds an offer they like, they can call the advertiser or request a quote.

"If a user requests a quote, Google automatically anonymizes the user’s phone number and sends you a unique code that you can use to contact the user," says Friedman. "You only pay if a user calls the phone number on your offer or fills out a form to request a quote."

Google cites speed, transparency, and privacy as the key points of focus with Comparison ads. They show targeted offers in less than a second, they only show real products (meaning no teaser rates, baits or switch offers), and they won’t send advertisers any user information.

Related Articles:

> Google Launches Latest Version of AdWords API

> More "Ads by Google" Across the Web

> Google Gives Local Businesses New Way to Advertise

Google has launched a new tool in the US and the UK to measure the impact of display ad campaigns across the Google Content Network. It’s called Campaign Insights.

Google says the tool can give reliable data about how a campaign has raised brand awareness or active user interest, in a particular product or service. It calculates the incremental lift in both online search activity and website visits resulting from a display ad campaign.

"Campaign Insights compares two data sets: a large group of users (many thousands, minimum) who saw a particular ad, with an equivalent, large group that did not see the ad," explains Austin Rachlin of Google’s Inside AdWords crew. "It then measures whether there is any significant difference in searches and visits to your website between the two groups. Doing this, Campaign Insights can determine the incremental change that is directly attributable to the display ad campaign. With this insight, you can establish how well your display ad campaign is working beyond just clicks."

"Campaign Insights provides highly reliable results to marketers because of the statistical methodology our computer algorithms use to combine and analyze large volumes of data from several sources — the advertiser’s own campaign information, ad serving logs, and sampled data from Google Toolbar users who have opted in to enhanced features," continues Rachlin. "All of the results reported to advertisers are anonymized and aggregated over thousands of users."

Right now Google is telling advertisers who want to try out Campaign Insights to check with their Google representatives.

SearchIgnite has released a report, which indicates that paid search spending in the United States was flat year-over-year in the third quarter, yet up 10% quarter-over-quarter. This comes largely from multi-channel retailers, who increased paid search spend by 40% in the quarter, according to the firm. This is despite flat conversion rates and average order value.

"This is the second consecutive quarter of sequential growth for paid search spend, indicating marketers’ continued confidence in search marketing as an efficient component of their overall marketing mix," said Roger Barnette, President of SearchIgnite. "Multi-channel retailers in particular have continued to rely more heavily on paid search as a key driver of sales in a challenging economic environment."

According to the report, Bing saw the most pronounced growth in spend among the top three search engines, an increase of 15% year-over-year (presumably compared to Microsoft Live Search). Yahoo, on the other hand, was down 24% year-over-year.

The report also states the obvious,  that there was no movement in search share, as far as rank, but year-over-year, Yahoo lost share to Google, while Bing showed "little" growth.

"Microsoft is headed in the right direction with Bing and attracting more advertiser dollars. That said, it’s an uphill battle against Google and there’s still a long way to go before Bing garners a significant amount of the search ad revenue pie," said Barnette.

More information about paid search spend for the quarter can be found in the report. SearchIgnite says it manages over $350 million in paid search annually.

Microsoft’s share of U.S. Internet searches rose modestly in June with the launch of Bing accounting for 8.4 percent of queries, up from 8 percent in May, according to comScore.

Yahoo saw its search share fall to 19.6 percent, from 20.1 percent in May, while Google’s share remained flat at 65 percent.

In a report, Douglas Anmuth, an analyst for Barclays Capital, wrote he had been expecting Bing’s share to come in between 10 percent and 11 percent. He said the comScore data was good news to investors of Google and Yahoo concerned about Bing’s initial impact.

"While the share gain is positive for Microsoft, and Bing was the only one of the 3 large search engines to increase queries [from month to month], we had expected Bing share to come in between 10-11%," Anmuth wrote.

Mike Nichols

"As a result, we believe the search data is a slight positive for both Google & Yahoo, and it should serve as a sigh of relief to some investors who were concerned about the early impact of Bing. Bing’s gains did come virtually all from Yahoo, but the overall impact was still less than anticipated."

In a statement, Mike Nichols, general manager of Bing, said the company was "gratified to see some upward momentum for Bing in the public numbers from comScore" and was working hard to "build a loyal fan base for Bing."

In a recent blog post, Microsoft reported that Bing saw 8 percent growth in unique users in June and that advertiser TigerDirect had seen its sales and order volume triple since the launch of Bing.

Search spending from retailers was up 36 percent year-over-year in the second quarter across all major search engines, according to a new report from SearchIgnite.

The trend was not seen in other categories, such as travel and finance, and U.S. search spend was down 6.5 percent for the quarter.

Retail search spend increased steadily as the quarter went on, with June showing an increase in spend of 55 percent compared with June 2008.

"We’ve seen very strong paid search spend from retailers for the last several quarters, a trend that can be attributed to an increase in retailer’s promotional activity as they turn to heavy discounting and sales to drive purchases," said Roger Barnette, President of SearchIgnite.

Google continued to lead with 77 percent of search market spend. Yahoo showed declined in Q2, coming in at 17 percent of spend and with their search share down 26 percent compared with a year earlier.

The launch of Microsoft’s new search engine Bing, showed little impact on its share of paid search advertising. Microsoft’s search spend remained at 6 percent in Q2.

"Microsoft appears to be focusing its efforts on driving consumer interest and capturing increased search query share," said Barnette.

"We have not yet seen this translate into more paid search advertising dollars for Microsoft, although typically consumer adoption precedes advertiser adoption."

Are you one of those people who have a Twitter account, but doesn’t use it? If so, you’re not alone. Fresh statistics from the prestigious Harvard Business Review reveals that most Twitter account holders hardly every Tweet, retweet, follow, or are followed. In fact, in the random sampling of more than 300,000 Twitter users, the survey discovered that only 10 percent of Twitter users are generating nearly 90 percent of all those Tweets going out every day. That slim 10 percent can include anyone from an over-active advertiser, to a bored celeb who tweets all the time.

The vast 90% of Twitter account holders have probably lost their passwords, lost interest, or just don’t have time. A whopping 50% of Twitter users only Tweet once in every two and a half months. In addition, the majority of these lethargic Twitter users have Tweeted just once in their lifetime!

In addressing the gender breakdown, the study reports that men have more Twitter relationships than women—which goes contrary to typical social findings that define women as more relational. However, the study in no way suggests that men are more relational, only that men have 15% more Twitter followers and have followed more people than women.

These statistics could be alarming for Twitter. Most social networking sites report that the top 10% of users are producing 30% of the activity. With Twitter, this typical statistics is turned on its head. What this means for Twitter is that all the rage might not be that outrageous. With a slide in popularity and a scary user-not-using stat, Twitter may have to do something new to stay popular.

Article marketing continues to be a proven method for generating traffic to our websites and developing good search placement, even after all of these years. I have been reading articles online since 1995, and I continue to read a few dozen articles per week on subjects that are dear to my heart.

Some Claim That Article Marketing Does Not Work

Now and again, I will read a thread in a forum somewhere where somebody claims that article marketing does not work.

Some article-marketing critics will admit that they have only distributed only one or two articles. Well yeah, I can see why article marketing did not work for them – because they did not work at making article marketing profitable for them.

Article marketing is like any other method of advertising. If you don’t make a real investment in it, then you cannot reap great rewards from it.

The Marketing Rule Of Seven

Advertising professionals speak of the “Marketing Rule Of Seven,” which suggests that a consumer must see your marketing message at least seven times before they start to pay attention to your message. The pros also suggest that once seven exposures have been achieved, the consumer will make a subtle, subconscious connection to the advertiser. Recognition brings rewards, in that after seven exposures to an advertisement, consumers will start to feel as if they know enough about the advertiser to trust their sales message.

If television, radio and print advertisers understand that a company’s sales message must be seen or heard at least seven times, then why would you – the Internet marketer – think that you can write a single article and see the full benefit of the medium?

Successful Article Marketing Requires A Commitment To The Reader

All commerce on the Internet is driven by information, such as written sales messages and information about products and services. Some websites also benefit from generic information concerning topics that their potential clients will be interested in reading. For example, if a website sells plumbing supplies, the consumer may find the availability of information about how to remove the old fittings and how to install the new plumbing equipment, as an essential element of their purchase decision.

Article marketing when done correctly will not be a boring, blathering of search engine optimized keywords related to a product or service line.

Article marketing, when done well, will provide information that will be of real interest to the person most likely to buy what you are selling.

For example:

• If you are selling auction services, give the reader tips to help them make more money from the sale of their goods in the auction environment or how a buyer can find a good deal.
• If you are selling auto warranties, tell the reader how to uncover the best value in an auto warranty plan and what features to seek.
• If you are selling resume services, give the reader advice on how to write their own resume.

Article marketing when used well can help a company establish itself as an expert in the field, and it can help show a reader why hiring the author’s service might be better than a do-it-yourself project. As an example, with the resume advice article, once the reader sees how comprehensive your knowledge is and how detailed a resume should be, the reader may just decide that using your resume writing service will be much more productive than the do-it-yourself resume.

Just Like Lawyers, Writers Specialize Too

Beyond the cost of labor, content development is usually the second most expensive expenditure made by the online vendor. It is important to note that just as there are lawyers who specialize in one area of law, there are also ghostwriters who specialize in certain types of content creation.

People who write sales copy are referred to as “copywriters.” Copywriters are people who understand the nuances of how to make people buy what you are selling.

They understand that replacing a single word in the sales copy could mean the difference between lukewarm sales numbers and red-hot sales numbers, and they know which words to change.

Some professional copywriters have a proven track record of writing sales copy that has generated millions of dollars in sales – people such as Frank Kern, Dan Lok, and Joe Vitale. These guys know the value of their copywriting skills, and they charge accordingly. If you ask them to write sales copy for you, don’t be surprised when they quote you a price in the range of $5-20 per written word.

Other writers might specialize in writing books, brochures, and articles. Some writers specialize in the smaller word counts, like the folks who write greeting cards and book jackets.

Finding The Best Writer For Your Needs

The kid down the street who writes part-time for the newspaper may or may not be the best person to write your online articles for you. One reason is that people who write for offline publications seldom appreciate the importance of keywords in an article for search engine marketing purposes.

Note this article for example. Our purpose is to show you how you can use article marketing as a successful marketing tool for your business. We also want to show how the articles should appeal both to the reader and the search engine algorithms.

With these thoughts in mind, when you are finished reading this article, read it a second time to see how many variations on the following SEO keyword phrases can be found in this article: article marketing, search engine marketing, keywords, advertising, content creation, writers and copywriting. Of course, copywriting is not the kind of writing we do, but people who do not understand the specialization of writing skills might type “copywriting” or “copywriters” into their favorite search engine to find someone who writes informational articles.

One never knows precisely what the public will use as their search keywords when they go to the search engine to find information. That is the very reason why a good online article writer must strive to showcase a range of similar keywords within the context of an article.

Your Article Marketing Strategies Influence Your Overall Success

We know that some people tell you that the only reason to write an article is to get a link back to your website. What most of these people don’t tell you is that most websites that accept reprint articles do so, only after a human has reviewed or at least scanned the article.

An article that does not read well will never be published on a top-tier website. Yes, some websites may accept a poorly written article, but more sites will only accept well-written articles.

A reader who is not impressed with your article will seldom reach your resource box, so the link back in the resource box can only give value to your website from the search engines – maybe. The search engines generally only give value to articles on good websites or those placements that have lots of links pointing to the article within the website. Bad articles don’t get published on good websites, and they do not attract links.

As the Marketing Rule Of Seven should indicate, multiple articles generate a long-term wave of new links and potential visitors to your website.

Consistency is also important to a successful article marketing campaign, in that releasing weekly articles will enable your readers to see your marketing message regularly.

Finally, the smart use of a variety of related keyword phrases will strengthen the ability of your article to appeal to the search engines and the people who use them.

If you can balance the needs of your article’s audience against your need for search optimized content, then you can benefit handsomely from your article marketing campaigns.

About The Author:

Hunter Waterhouse has managed article ghost writers and building websites for a number of years. Over the last several years, Hunter has been employed by http://www.thephantomwriters.com/ To learn about the new WordPress plugin, which will enable you to receive targeted articles directly from The Phantom Writers Article Distribution Service, as they become available, please visit: http://www.backlinksmagnet.com/blog/

Post from: SiteProNews: Webmaster News & Resources

Balancing SEO Against The Needs of Your Article’s Audience

Advertisers using paid search may find that they have to adapt to the habits of searchers. And there have been indications that searchers are using longer queries to find what they are looking for these days.

comScore shares some rather interesting data showing that the number of paid clicks has grown 3 times slower than the total number of queries in the US since January 2007. Look at these graphs:

The percentage of SERPS (search engine results pages) that actually feature paid ads appears to be on the decline according to comScore.

"An analysis of comScore data shows that search queries are actually getting longer and that as searchers become more experienced they are using more words per search query," explains comScore’s Gian Fulgoni. "And this apparently reduces the likelihood that an advertiser has bid to have his/her ad included in the results page from these longer queries, due to paid search advertising strategies that limit ad coverage, such as Exact Match, Negative Match, and bid management software campaign optimization."

The data makes me wonder if we might start to see a trend in longer query keywords being bid upon. This could make the game much more tricky, because obviously the longer the query, the more combinations of keywords. It would really require a lot analysis of search trends and thinking from inside the customer’s shoes.

A few weeks ago, it was reported that Google was testing an online version of its Google TV Ads. They’re now launching Google TV Ads Online in beta by invitation only.

It’s pretty cool because advertisers can target specific shows, and ads will show up whether they’re being broadcast on television or on the web. "These programs may appear in various places, including the websites of the networks which originally broadcast them and on other sites that specialize in video content," explains Google TV Ads Product Manager Geoff Smith. "What if an advertiser wants to reach the audience of a particular program, no matter whether they’re watching on a television or online?"

Advertisers can target specific shows and select their cost-per-thousand (CPM) bid. Then, based on targets, budgets and bids, ads are shown in the regular ad slot that would take place during a show’s originally airing. Ads can also be shown pre-roll or post-roll (below is a short video on Google TV Ads).

This news comes along with a another major announcement from Google. YouTube is now offering feature films and television shows. Naturally, this would seem like the logical time to introduce this online version of Google TV Ads. 

While Google TV Ads Online is only by invitation only, interested parties are encouraged to contact Erin Bouchier at erinb@google.com if they wish to be considered for the program.

AdGooroo’s latest search advertiser report has been released, and it looks like some interesting changes may be taking place.  Namely: Google and Yahoo almost seem to have swapped positions on the impressive-to-iffy spectrum. 

Yahoo apparently managed to attract 10 percent more active first-page advertisers in the first quarter.  Its overall advertiser share increased by four percent, too.  AdGooroo’s founder and "Chief Gooroo" Rich Stokes summarized in a statement, "I would not be surprised to see good news from Yahoo! this month based on data included in this report."

As for Google, AdGooroo believes it initiated an increase in the number of ads without a corresponding rise in the number of advertisers.  Google’s growth was more forced than organic, in other words.  Stokes observed, "We haven’t seen this in our analysis until now," so Google’s financial report will perhaps be less positive.

Finally, Microsoft experienced a decrease in advertiser share, and didn’t distinguish itself much in any other way.

Google will announce its first quarter results on Thursday, Yahoo will follow on Tuesday the 21st, and Microsoft will take its turn on Thursday the 23rd, so stay tuned.