Frequent Flirters

Avalanche Selects Google Ad Manager

PR NEWSWIRE -- Sep 15 -- Avalanche, owner of Date.com, Matchmaker.com and Amor.com, has transitioned to Google Ad Manager(TM) as their online advertising management platform. The company currently utilizes Google Ad Manager for 100% of its ad serving needs across its three sites. FULL ARTICLE @ THE EARTH TIMES

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Google Launches Affiliate Advertising Network

TECH CRUNCH -- June 30 -- Google launched an affiliate ad network. Or, rather, it rebranded Performics, the affiliate ad network that came along with its purchase of DoubleClick, as the "Google Affiliate Network." The service isn't yet integrated into Google AdSense, but that would be a logical next step. Google also continues to experiment with a pay-per-action advertising program, which is still in beta. FULL ARTICLE @ TECH CRUNCH

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Google Web Site Optimization Tool

MEDIA PUBLICATION -- Apr 4 -- Google today launches Google Website Optimizer, a product designed to help Web site owners test drive different landing pages in order to determine which designs drive the most conversions. Website Optimizer is integrated with Google AdWords. Sign up at www.google.com/websiteoptimizer. FULL ARTICLE @ MEDIA PUBLICATION

Google Pay-per-Action Beta

INSIDE ADWORDS -- Apr 2 -- Pay-per-action ads are only eligible to show in the Google content network.  AdSense users should visit the AdSense referrals beta site to sign up using the 'Sign Up' link.  Google is only accepting advertisers who have a billing address located in the USA. FULL ARTICLE @ INSIDE ADWORDS

Google Pay-Per-Action Launches for AdWords & AdSense

SEJ -- Mar 21 -- Google has rolled out the beta version of their new affiliate influenced Pay-Per-Action Adwords model where advertisers pay Google & its publishers only when a user has clicked on the ad then performed a specific action; a sale or lead or the completion of a contact form, or a free trial subscription or download.  First, you'll create an ad and define the action that you want a user to perform when they visit your site, such as signing up for your newsletter or purchasing a product. Then you'll set the amount that you're willing to pay when this action is completed. Finally, you'll install conversion tracking code on your website so that we can verify when an action has been completed. FULL ARTICLE @ SEJ

Mark Brooks: Buh-bye CJ, Linkshare. 

CPC Option for Some Google Advertisers

BIZ REPORT -- Feb 21 -- Starting next month, some Google advertisers will be able to choose CPC advertising options to place display ads on specific websites. Google is looking for advertisers to take part in the pilot program. FULL ARTICLE @ BIZ REPORT

Mark Brooks: How will the likes of CJ and LinkShare fare when Google gets traction with CPA advertising?

Link Building

SEJ -- Jan 11 -- Choose relevant on topic websites. Don't buy just one link. Buy links for at least 6 months. Do a check up half of the way through and make sure things are moving in the right direction.  Don't buy for soley link popularity, instead buy for traffic. Anything below 10k Alexa will have real traffic. If you aren't getting any direct ROI from that traffic, re-evaluate what and why you are buying those advertisements.

Air on the cautious side as Google tends to penalize sites for buying some links, or buying too many, so they need to meet the right criteria of acceptable advertising, which is traffic, relativity and placement on the page. Spend the money on a good release and distribution. FULL ARTICLE @SEJ

Online Dating & SN Site Google Page Ranks

iDATE FORUMS, Marc Lesnick -- Nov 20 -- Here's Google's Page Ranks for various online dating and social networking sites:
9 -- Match.com
8 -- Y! Personals, MySpace, Orkut, Chemistry, Friendster, Perfect Match, YouTube
7 -- eHarmony, JDate, Date, Lavalife, TRUE, Bebo, Facebook, Friendfinder, iLove.de, LinkedIn, Meetic, HotorNOt
6 -- Bolt.com, Cupid.com, eCrush.com, Gay.com , Parship.de, Plentyoffish
5 -- Baihe, Dating.dk, Mate1, Neu.de, MatchDoctor.com, Manhunt.net, Sexsearch
4 -- Adam4Adam, Gaia Online, SportsFansMatch, Tianji, WebDate
3 -- 51Friend, eRomance, JWoo
0 -- GreatExpectations, AmericanSingles, Friendscout

iDate2006.com got a page ranking of 6. Google scores 10 (of course). So did the New York Times. NASA and the White House. CNN, Yahoo, Dell, Hotels.com, Mapquest, eBay, Amazon and Columbia University got a page rank of 9. American Express, Travelocity and Sony got a page rank of 8.  Scoring a 7 were Citibank, HSBC Bank, Coca Cola and Pepsi. Google gives a ranking of 6 to Lancome, Revlon and model Pamela Anderson. How did the other models do? Page ranking of 5 to Heidi Klum and Cindy Margolis. Unbelievably, Cindy Crawford got a page ranking of 3. FULL ARTICLE @ IDATE

Mark Brooks: ...and Online Personals Watch scores a 5. What does your site score?  What have you done lately to improve it? Does it matter? Your comments please...but not here. Click here.

Search: Big Three Using Same Tool

BIZ REPORT -- Nov 17 -- Google, Yahoo and Microsoft are joining together to provide a standard search protocol for marketers, publishers and website owners. The collaboration will allow websites to be easily indexed by search engines. Based at SiteMaps.org, the new protocol provides instructions for webmasters to install an XML file that will allow the engines to track website updates. FULL ARTICLE @ BIZ REPORT

ComScore: Most Traffic to Top U.S. Sites Is Global

MARKETING VOX -- Nov 11 -- A new study by ComScore claims that the majority of traffic to the top U.S. websites isn't domestic. It's international. Google, Microsoft sites, Yahoo and CNET Networks, derive at least 70% of their traffic from non-U.S. users. FULL ARTICLE @ MARKETING VOX

Mark Brooks: If you want US traffic, these days you need to make sure to ask for it!

Adwords Quality Score Update

REVENEWS -- Nov 7 -- Google has become increasingly concerned with user experience, and now consider any affiliate pages with the sole purpose of driving traffic to a merchant as low quality. Updates this year sent many affiliate marketers back to the drawing board. There's another update coming in the next few days. "Advertisers who may be providing a poor experience on their site will notice that their traffic across the content network decreases as a result of this change." If there's nothing to do on a landing page but click on an affiliate link, you can be sure that they'll be coming down on that sooner or later.  What's an affiliate marketer to do?  1. Link direct. as long as the merchant is ok with it, Google has no problem with affiliates advertising on behalf of merchants.  2. Add Value. Do something that says, "this site has something to offer other than a link to a merchant."  Privacy policies, contact information, unique content, and user signups.  Read Google's landing page quality guidelines for some clues about what they're looking for. FULL ARTICLE @ RVENEWS

Mark Brooks: and I hope they figure out a way to clamp down on splogs and site scrapers in the process.

Link Buying for Google PageRank on UPI.com

SE JOURNAL BLOG -- Oct 19 -- I'm a bit shocked that such an institution as UPI would be publicly selling these links and publishing that by purchasing such links advertiser sites could benefit by increasing their page rank. FULL ARTICLE @ SE JOURNAL BLOG

Mark Brooks: It does seem a little external to their core business.

Google AdWords Releases Website Optimizer for Advertisers

SEW BLOG -- Oct 19 -- Google AdWords has released a new tool for advertisers to enable them to easily test conversions on varying landing pages, headlines and ad copies. FULL ARTICLE @ SEW BLOG

Learn More About Googlebot's Crawl of Your Site

GOOGLE BLOG -- Oct 17 -- Googlebot activity reports - See the number of pages Googlebot's crawled from your site per day for the last 90 days. Crawl rate control - We crawl as many pages from your site as we can on each visit without overwhelming your server's bandwidth. If you'd like Googlebot to slow down the crawl of your site, simply choose the Slower option. If we feel your server could handle the additional bandwidth, and we can crawl your site more, we'll let you know and offer the option for a faster crawl. Changes last for 90 days. If you liked the changed rate, make the change again. FULL ARTICLE @ GOOGLE BLOG

Doing Link Research

WEBSITE PUBLISHER BLOG -- Oct 17 -- Google was the first search engine to provide a link search that would allow you to learn who was linking to a page, and they included easy access to this search in their toolbar, but they don't include all known links, only a sample. Try Yahoo's new Site Explorer search engine. You can specify if you want all links pointing to a URL. Another neat new tool for link research is MSN's LinkFromDomain operator which tells you where your competitors link to. FULL ARTICLE @ WEBSITE PUBLISHER

Google Blog Ping Service

SEJ BLOG -- Oct 6 -- Google Blog Search Pinging Service allows bloggers and blog providers to instantly inform Google Blog Search of new posts and content changes. Besides this new Pinging Service, Google Blog Search uses other ping services to update its index. Many commercial blogging providers may already be pinging Google Blog Search, so you should check with your provider. You can manually ping the service or ping through the Google Blog Search Pinging Service API. Here's a complete list of quality services to ping. FULL ARTICLE @ SEARCH ENGINE JOURNAL BLOG

Mark Brooks: Hook your (internet dating related) blog up to Feedburner and turn on it's pinging services.  Pingomatic is one of the services, and will take care of most of your needs. Don't spam ping services, or they'll block you. And, bear in mind that Google is cracking down on splogs (blogs full of text that make enough sense to search engines to get referenced but are actually just spam text designed to get ranking).

Adsense Google Referrer Test

APIS BLOG -- Oct 6 -- Conclusion: Google referred users are more likely to click on Google Ads.  Google user's CTR is significantly higher than non Google users. However, I'm massively frustrated with only 200 channels in Google Adsense for Content. This is far too low to do the testing I want to do. I am exploring AdLogger as a solution. FULL ARTICLE @ APIS