knofun

So yesterday I was bummed to find that Google is leaving the radio advertising space. This is, in the immortal words of The Dude, a bummer man. We were having a lot of fun promoting sites on traditional radio, so much so I blogged about it. Oh well que cera cera, on to TV advertising.

But then today I get this email from the AdWords team:

Dear AdWords Advertiser,

Beginning on May 31st, we will discontinue the current Audio Ads
platform. We have decided to exit the broadcast radio business and
focus our efforts on exploring internet-based solutions that will
deliver relevant online streaming audio ads. Stay tuned for more
information about these initiatives later this year.

What does this change mean for you?
- Campaigns: Your active campaigns will continue to run up until
May 31st, but will no longer run after that date. You will not be
able to create any new Audio Ads campaigns after May 30th.
- Reports: You will continue to be able to access your reports for
all past campaigns up until June 12th. If you would like to keep
records of your campaign data, please run the reports as soon as
possible while the system is still fully operational.
- Billing: You will continue to be able to access your billing
information indefinitely.

We’re sharing this information with you now so that you’ll have
time to make other arrangements for your audio advertising after
May 31st. If you have questions, please feel free to contact us at
audio-support@google.com.

Sincerely,

The AdWords Team

Hey, thanks for the newsflash!

digital media, geek stuff, ventures, web marketing advertising, adwords, google, radio

I have never really been into PPC. Never had success with it, never could fathom it.. just seemed too tedious and boring, plus I hate to spend money. I do have a Google account, of course, for AdSense and Analytics and whatnot. When Shoemoney posted something about using Adwords to post radio ads promoting fighters.com, I got interested. 

My Dad is in traditional radio, so over the years I have been witness to the massive reach of radio content and advertising. My favorite pet project right now is carsforagrand.com, where you can find a cheap used car for under $1,000. I thought this would be a great fit what with the economy and all, so I used the super easy Ad Creation Marketplace and had Tony Brueski whip up an ad for us - for only $100!

Here’s our commercial

I have been testing it seriously since the beginning of the year and the results have been phenomenal. So much so we are preparing a little TV spot and going to try Google for television advertising.

I see what’s going on here, the big G is desperate to create some additional revenue to compliment its search business. It’s doing a damn good job. There is no way, no WAY I would have just been all “oh hey I’m gonna walk into a clearchannel office and buy some radio space for my website.” So much hassle, have to deal with people, whatever. And producing a commercial? Forget it! Google makes all those headaches go away with their system… its literally like ordering a pizza online, just pick what you want and click go. So in the process, G has sold more radio advertising, converted a new believer, made some sound guy some extra bread for making my commercial, made me some money, and made themselves some in the process. THIS IS THE AMERICAN WAY, we don’t need no stinking bailouts!

geek stuff, ventures, web marketing advertising, adwords, google, radio

In a move demonstratory of extreme idiocy, Comcast has this page specifically made to educate people who use Google Chrome or other browsers not on their list. Interestingly enough, Opera works fine even though it’s not on their ‘recommended’ list.

Read more…

geek stuff, rant chrome, comcast, google

When Microsoft promotes its search engine and its web browser inside of its 80%+ market share operating system, that’s a violation of antitrust laws. So when Google uses its 80%+ market share search engine to promote its content, what is that?

Jason Calacanis has rightly been raising a stink about this. I was trying to link to him but confusingly he is “retired from blogging” so I can’t link to his comments. I guess he is too cool for his own blog but not too cool for twitter and friend feed?

Anyways Jason has a good point. He is complaining, of course, out of self interest. His “human powered search engine” Mahalo is in essence a one-source wiki or a MFG site = “Made for Google.” I wonder what their ratio is of page views from their search box vs. page views from google. At any rate, Jason is understandably upset at this knol development, since they will be taking up a lot of room in the SERPS that probably used to belong to Mahalo. And the big elephant in the room, will Google the search engine give preferential placement to Google the content company? Jason has taken three steps to handle this. 1) Complain to his sizeable audience - loudly 2) complain to Matt Cutts - repeatedly 3) create a bunch of his own Mahalo pages on knol. Not a bad strategy, just like Jason: intelligent and shrewd.

So combine that with Aaron Wall’s breakdown on knol. Aaron does some more tests with knol, and pretty much proves Google is giving itself priority placement in its search results. Well, kind of. It’s not ranking #1 for anything yet, but compare that to a site you start 3-4 days after launch. You won’t even rank for your own name. Danny Sullivan did some tests for knol SERP results and found it was “giving pages an advantage they might not get if they’d been hosted on some other brand new web site.”

My thoughts? Well, everyone is making this big fuss just a few days after they launched. We all know that Google’s algorithms can take hours, days, or months to decide what they want to do. Also, everyone is comparing knol to a brand new site. Yeah, a brand new site on a domain with a pagerank of 10. The domain that INVENTED pagerank. Nevertheless, Google moving into content when they promised us they would only be there to ‘index the world’s information’ is a disturbing development, and certainly has a lot of potential for abuse.

other, ventures google, knol, seo

I love Google, but sometimes I want to tell her right where to stick it. Ok, breathe and preface: I am a internet marketer / programmer / nerd guy. By default Google is a big part of my life. For the most part, she is like most women: pay attention to her, make sure she knows she is on your mind always, do everything she asks the way she asks for it, and she will love and honor you. But, like most women, sometimes you can think you do everything right and she will bitch and moan and nag you and punish you and make your life hell.

Let me explain my scenario to you. I recently started a project called ZinText. This tool has been featured on eBay’s official developer’s blog. There has been writeup after writeup after writeup, all linking the word “zintext” to my site, www.zintext.com.

You would think at this point Google would know when someone searches for “zintext” they are trying to get to my site. But for some reason, through some hole in some algorithm written 10 years ago, or because some guy at google has a grudge against some site that linked to zintext, or because the freaking space time continuum has ceased to exist, Google thinks that visitors who search for “zintext” need to see this obviously SPAMMY page and never see zintext.com in their SERPS.

Now I am not a professional SEO nor would I ever claim to be, but I would like to think I know how to make a professional web page that should rank well in the SERPS. But who knows, maybe somehow I got too many links too fast or it’s because the project is an embedded javascript widget, but that doesn’t seem to apply to the competition. I can understand if I was trying to rank for “real estate foreclosure” or something like that but I am trying to rank for MY OWN NAME, something there should be no competition for.

And what can I do? Send an email to google with the subject line “how come my site doesn’t come up when I search for it?” Yeah right, I am sure they never get those. Maybe there’s someone I could call? I do know a couple engineers that work for google, but they are all in systems administration and would laugh if I asked them something like “Whats wrong with my SERPS?” So what can I do?

other google

So for the last three days Google Adsense has not been reporting properly. I guess I am spoiled by the big G always being so on point, so I am a little confused by this one. The situation is when you login to your normal Adsense control panel you are presented with an overall view of that day’s earnings and you can hit a dropdown for detailed stats by channel. Every Adsense publisher I know uses channels to optimize and track their ads, this is a heavily used feature of the program. To have it not working is disheartening to say the least.

I understand that every website / program has problems from time to time, but usually Goog will let us know on the Adsense Blog or something. Jensense hasn’t even posted anything, and she is usually on every little rumor. The only peep from Google has been users posting Adsense support responses on DigitalPoint:

Hi,

Thanks for your email. There appears to be an issue with channels not
properly tracking data, rest assured your aggregate data is registering
all impressions and clicks.

I’ve escalated your issue to one of our tech specialists. We’ll get back
to you shortly. I appreciate your patience.

Sincerely,

Sean
The Google AdSense Team

My guess? The last post on the Official Adsense Blog is about being able to manage your ad units from your control panel as opposed to modifying the code on your pages. This probably involves you being able to change things by ad unit and channel, and somewhere in there they had a bug in the reporting code. But come on Goog, let us know!!!

update: Seems to be working better but still showing a disparity between aggregate stats and channel stats. Google Groups has some more info as well.

geek stuff, web marketing adsense, google