Stanley Wong's Blog » SEM

Online Advertising Continuing Growth and Taking Share

swong — Thu, 09 Dec 2010 08:22:32 +0000

eMarketer put out a new round of forecasts for the coming new year and beyond.

Display Advertising - Branding is driving growth in display advertising, where online video is they key component with the greatest amount of growth. Overall, Display Advertising growth is outpacing Search. My POV: Online display has a higher upside, representing much greater (& higher growing) amounts of available inventory than search, and the continuing move towards inventory transparency and automated purchasing (via Ad Exchanges, Demand Side Platforms, & Real Time Bidding). Premium online video inventory continues grow giving brand marketers more opportunities to move from traditional media to online.

Search - eMarketer estimates US advertisers will spend $12.37 billion on paid search, compared with $8.88 billion on online display ads. My POV: Search will continue to be the performance leader for most marketers and hence the dollars will continue to flow there. The huge limiting factor are the constraints on search inventory growth.

Local Mobile - Huge growth expected in this area where US local mobile ad revenues are set to increase at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 57% from 2009 through 2014, according to a forecast by BIA/Kelsey. My POV: We are still in the very early stages of the mobile advertising market. Lots of experimental budgets being used to test this medium. What are the tipping points to get Local Mobile down stream towards SMBs? My guess is automated self service marketplaces and better tracking in order to measure ROI. Lot of work still left to do here.

Here’s to another banner new year in online advertising!

The Price of Internet Content SPAM

swong — Tue, 03 Apr 2007 06:25:08 +0000

A recent research report from Microsoft (NY Times article) claimed that approximately 11% of search results and as much as 30% of some competitive search results contain Internet Content SPAM. Spammers create these pages for the sole purpose of profiting from advertisements by fooling the search engines (i.e. Google, Yahoo!,etc.) to rank their pages well. Typically these SPAM sites are computer generated to create huge numbers of pages each targeted to rank well with a specific keyword.

There are many strategies, but typically these SPAM sites are computer generated to produce a huge numbers of pages, each targeted to rank well with a specific keyword. I’ve found several SPAM content generator scripts (YACG, RSSGM, WP AutoBlog, & MyGen) on the web that take content snippets from a variety of articles cribbed from across the web. These scripts auto generate content by jumbling content snippets into search engine readable pages using statistical algorithms such as Markov Chains. Add a custom template to make the site unique and create an internal link network between pages within the site.

Once the site is built, Spammers create huge numbers of bogus blogs (Blogger) and webpages (from free hosting sites such as Yahoo! GeoCities) to build links directed towards the Spam site. This confirmed by the Microsoft study where most free web hosting and free blog sites have over 70% Internet Content SPAM.

Internet Content SPAM is a huge problem for Search Engines because it degrades the quality their search results. As Albert Einstein famously said “We can’t solve problems by using the same kind of thinking we used when we created them.”, it is tough for Search Engines to identify Internet Content SPAM. Typical approaches entail usage of filters and/or blacklists when a SPAM signature or domain is discovered. This makes Internet Content SPAM one of the most vexing issues for this generation of Search Engines.

Yahoo!’s Project Panama

swong — Fri, 07 Apr 2006 18:26:11 +0000

As reported by Forbes, Yahoo! is finally rolling out the test versions of their version of the Google AdWords ranking algorithm, called Project Panama. Like Google, Yahoo! Search Marketing advertisements will be ranked on keywords searches by the bid amount advertisers are willing to pay for keywords and the click index (measure of relevance) for the ad. Its about time!
If you have been following Google’s financial performance as compared to Yahoo!’s over the past couple of years, you’ll notice that Google’s margins have far exceeded Yahoo!’s. Back in October 2005, Google released a new AdWords quality and relevancy ranking algorithms that have contributed to the higher than expected Q4 earnings for Google and widening of margins as compared to Yahoo! Essentially Google AdWords is tuned to maximize their revenues.
As a Yahoo! stockholder and a former employee, I have been continually frustrated by the lack of progress Yahoo! has had in whipping the former Overture division into shape. The new Yahoo! Search Marketing platform was rumored to have been beset by Microsoft Vista-like delays and setbacks for almost two years. According to the Forbes article it is estimated this new platform will be released on the second half of 2006.
Here is my wish list for the new Yahoo! Search Marketing Platform:

A|B Testing – The currently Yahoo! doesn’t allow you to rotate more than one advertisement at a time. That means I can’t test and improve my ads on the Yahoo! platform. Since I am also restricted by Yahoo!’s strict 3-4 business day editorial review this makes it virtually impossible to test ads in a meaningful way. If Yahoo! is going to factor in the click index into the ranking the system should encourage testing.
Open Up the API – Unlike the Google AdWords API, access to the Search Marketing API is very restrictive. Access to the API typically requires an NDA, advertiser review (they review what you plan on doing with the system), a lengthy legal contract, and negotiating transactional charges.
Faster Automated Editorial Reviews – Google AdWords has automated system to flag editorial issues. With Google AdWords your campaign can be up and running with your ad within 30 minutes. There is no reason why Yahoo! shouldn’t have a similar system. The manual editorial process on Yahoo! Search Marketing is way too slow and inconsistent.
Real Time Reporting – Google has the ability to report your stats from your campaign at near real time (~15 minute delay). Yahoo! on the other hand requires a 24 hour delay.
Opt-Out/Exclude Sites – I would like the ability to exclude or at least bid separately for my ads showing up on low performing parking pages.
Improve Targeting Capabilities – Add the ability to target by age, gender, occupation, zip codes, etc. MSN AdCenter have announced they will have this functionality
Integrate Yahoo! Publisher Network – I would like the ability to bid on separately for their content network.

BTW… I feel this new search marketing platform has a potential to have a huge positive impact to Yahoo!’s bottom line. As a result I remain long on YHOO as we speak.