Below are some pics of our team and the show floor. 

Congrats to Edgar Marin from Acronym Media for winning the iPhone from our business card drop!

If you’re heading out to ad:tech San Fran, come party with us as we kick off our new brand name Advertise.com! Here’s the party invite.

Hope to see you there!

THe ABCSearch team

…if you fell for that one, I’ve got some magic beans I can sell you!

Happy April Fool’s Day!

This week the ABCSearch team is hitting the road to attend the Search Engine Strategies show in New York City from March 23-25. If you’re in the area, or attending the show, swing by our booth #214 and say hello. No doubt we’ll see some interesting news come out of the show, but we always like meeting up with friends.

For those of you who are attending, check out Chris Boggs’ Search Engine Watch Guide to SES NYC for his tips and pointers. 

See you on the show floor!

It’s official! The votes have been cast and SEMPO’s Board of Directors has elected a great new group of officers to begin their one year term on April 1^st. Some of these names will be familiar to your industry followers, but there are some new faces. From the press release (courtesy of  SearchEngineLand):

• Jeffrey Pruitt, formerly SEMPO president and executive vice president of corporate partnerships, iCrossing, was elected chairman 
• Sara Holoubek, corporate strategy consultant, was elected president.
• Ron Jones, president and CEO of Symetri Internet Marketing, was elected vice president of SEMPO
• Dave Fall, group product manager, Google, Inc., was elected treasurer.
• Chris Boggs, director of search engine optimization for Rosetta, was elected secretary

Pruitt also said that SEMPO will be focusing on three areas this term: thought leadership, increased global and local activity, and continued growth of SEMPO Institute.

Congratulations to everyone! We’re looking forward to seeing what this coming year will bring and the pending “State of the Market” report that is due out soon!

In a recent Adotas Article, Dianna Koltz discusses the different definitions between “Fraud” and “Bad Quality” traffic raising some very interesting points; the definition of “Fraud” traffic is commonly blurred between low converting and non-human.

Dianna makes an accurate observation: “Advertisers may be conditioned to scream “Fraud!” instead of “Bad Quality!” like the public was trained to yell “Fire!” instead of “Help!” when attempting to attract attention.  Are advertisers crying wolf when it comes to fraud? Or, is the fraud simply bad traffic?”

Of course, when properly supported, non-human traffic is considered as fraud to which we would credit the advertiser and investigate our traffic partner.  However,  when the traffic is low converting, there are a multitude of reasons this can happen on the advertisers side:  landing page, offer, sales funnel..etc.  However, publishers aren’t given as many options when it comes to low performance when most of the time, it’s just a matter of traffic optimization.  Networks get their traffic from thousands of sources and many can easily make these optimizations with a little feedback from the advertiser; Conversion tracking allows the publisher to track success and weed out low performing sources.  Another way to optimize would be to do something like we do over here at ABC by passing through traffic source ID’s with every click allowing the advertiser to track every traffic source down to the affiliate of our affiliate.  Advertisers are then able to work with the network  by carving out the non-performers, leaving only the good stuff.  9 times out of 10 this solves any traffic quality/legitimacy complaints from the advertiser allowing for a successful and efficient partnership with the publisher network.

Thanks for the thought-piece Dianna, traffic quality is always a concern, but calling it fraud is rarely a solution.

-Simon Chernin, Marketing Director, ABCSearch.com

For those that got sidetracked at the show or didn’t make it out, Barry Schwartz at SearchEngineLand pulled together a nice recap of SMX coverage for each day of the show. The live blogging coverage is especially entertaining.

For the folks more interested in the social media side, Twiistup boasted a great turnout last Thursday night in LA and pulled in a colorful group of companies and attendees.

Then there is the SES London show which kicked off today and will undoubtedly attract an dynamic group of industry experts. The Mini Site Clinics that SearchEngineWatch’s blog talked about sounded like an especially interesting way to cram some more items into an already packed agenda. If you made it out to the show, where these clinics helpful?

No doubt everyone will be trying to catch their breath after this week, but hopefully attendees found the value they were looking for at all of these events!

 

Click Forensics, a tracking company for the online advertising industry, recently put out a rather distressing announcement on the current state of click fraud. The company states that the overall industry average click fraud rate grew to 17.1% for Q4 2008, which is up from 16.0% in Q3 2008 and from the 16.6% rate reported for Q4 2007. The number is even more inflated when taking into account the average click fraud rate of PPC advertisements appearing on search engine content networks, which hit an all-time high of 28.2%.

We at ABCSearch take this problem very seriously and implement ClickShield as a way to combat this growing problem. ClickShield is our proprietary and independently-certified fraud-monitoring technology customized specifically for the ABCSearch network of advertisers and helps to keep click fraud on our network to under 5%.

Advertisers should not have to be worried about paying for fraudulent traffic. They should be confident in the fact their dollars are going to the right places for the right things.

-The ABCSearch Team

–The ABCSearch team

According to the Wall Street Journal, Carol Bartz has accepted an offer from Yahoo! to become the company’s new chief executive officer. Bartz, the former CEO of Autodesk Inc., will replace Jerry Yang who stepped down from the Internet firm in mid-November.

We’d like to congratulate Carol on her new position and wish her the best of luck!

-The ABCSearch Team

The Situation: About six months ago Yahoo released sent new terms and conditions to advertisers outlining some revised conditions. Included in those conditions was the following snippet that has set off some… strong reactions:

Sponsored Search 3. OPTIMIZATION. In the U.S. only, for those advertisers not bound by an Insertion Order, we may help you optimize your account(s). Accordingly, you expressly agree that we may also: (i) create ads, (ii) add and/or remove keywords, and/or (iii) optimize your account(s). We will notify you via email of such changes made to your account(s), and can also include a spreadsheet of such changes upon your written request.

Basically this legal statement informs advertisers that Yahoo has the right to make edits to ads and/or keywords without the “May I please…” prerequisite. Now despite the fact that this isn’t news, it is just now catching the attention of some folks and stirring some controversy among industry commentators such as Andy Beal and Frank Watson who put their stamp of un-approval on this move. Barry Schwartz at Search Engine Land summed up the frustrations in a post this week and pointed that his problem wasn’t the statement, but the action of Yahoo reps actually carrying out the edits without formal permission.

Like every story there are two sides though that you need to keep in mind before you pass the righteous hand of judgment.

ONE side: In many instances “edits” are probably not extensive (grammatical changes) and in the interest of saving both Yahoo reps and advertisers time, making a correction without the many levels of permission seeking that is often involved is a benefit.

The OTHER side: In these tumultuous economic times, client trust is critical for both sides. Jeopardizing that trust by making unauthorized changes is a risky move, however we hope that the reps who feel compelled to do so are also working with this in mind so as not to make their advertisers uncomfortable.

No doubt we’ll see more on the subject as time goes on, but for now what are your thoughts? Will the debate roll on?