Kitmondo.com

Discontent with content

I picked up an interesting paper from John Battelle’s site investigating PPC advertising and CPA (written by Alexandre Douzet of theladders.com).

As far as I know it’s the first published study of the relative performance of Google search ads against Google content network ads.

I’ve always had a natural aversion to advertising on Google’s content network as it requires me to fly our ads completely blindfold. And, although I trust Google sufficiently to assume they will put my ads on pages with at least some degree of keyword relevance, I have recently decided buying ads I can’t even see is too great a leap of faith.

Is it so difficult for Google to give its advertisers some visibility of the sites they are paying to advertise on?  Without it, I suspect many happy search advertisers will continue to disable content network.

There are simply too many unknowns:

• do any of these sites undermine my brand?
• is my ad being served on pages written in a negative context?
• do I trust publishers on the network not to be clickfraud perps?
• is my ad copy relevant or optimised?

Album of the Week

by Richard   

Imogen Heap's "Speak for Yourself".

Quirky electronica. Very cool.

Keeping it in the Family

Question:
Entering dvd into google.com (from a UK IP address) returns 451m search results. Guess which company sits proudly at position no. 2?

Answer:
www.google.co.uk

Even better, entering dvd into google.co.uk returns www.google.co.uk at no. 1 position.

You've got to feel sorry for all those SEO guys trying to squeeze an extra page position or two from the algorithm....

When is a lead not a lead?

Ken Sonenclar of Desilva & Phillips has published an interesting white paper on the online lead generation industry. Although he approaches the subject from a M & A perspective his take on the sector is sound and manages to capture the essence of the opportunity we have in front of us.

The paper throws a wide blanket over the lead-gen business and interestingly includes comparison engines like Shopzilla and Pricegrabber in its assessment. As Greg Yardley’s comment suggests, this is likely to be at odds with any market definition you’d receive from the lead-generators themselves.

It does however raise the question when is a lead a lead and when is it click-thru. Although Ken is careful to distinguish between the attributes of businesses that are collecting (and reselling) sales contact data and those re-routing sales intent, I’m inclined to agree with Greg that shopping comparison engines are playing a different game.

A lead is a vendor actionable enquiry with intrinsic, potentially recurring value. Anything else is good traffic or bad traffic.

Missing Words

I can only apologise for a severe lack of posting of late. Business is developing at a gallop and some things have simply fallen through the cracks in the working day.

Huge respect to those entrepreneurs who figure out how to blog regularly while building their businesses.

Richard