The following are some interesting functionality improvements that Advertisers should be excited about:

Sitelink Extensions

It has been a long time in the making, but Google has finally addressed the missteps in its Site Link Extensions functionality and delivered what Advertisers have been clamoring for since launch.

First, they will finally be offering the ability to see actual site link level reporting.  Until now, Advertisers could only obtain front end data on the Sitelink block, but could not determine which Sitelinks were improving or impairing your performance.  While you could track visitors to your site, the missing link was click rates associated with those visits.

More importantly, Google announced it will offer Sitelinks at the Ad Group level.  This will lead to increased Sitelinks usage by eliminating the need to split up campaigns to be able to create more relevant communication.  By applying Sitelinks at the Ad Group level, where the relevancy structure is already applied to effectively connect the ad communication to the keyword, it will allow Advertisers to customize their Sitelinks and likely enable more advertisers to utilize a functionality which often positively impacts campaign performance.

Finally, for those that use Call Extensions, help is on the way.  A major deterrence with the current Adwords system is the all-in restrictions that require advertisers to run Call Extensions 24/7 unless you are willing to go through the cumbersome process of manually turning on and off.  Adwords will be now offering scheduling tools that will allow you to turn on not only Call Extensions for different dayparts, but also standard sitelinks that will allow Advertisers to remove expired promotions on an automated timing basis rather than manually.

Location Based Bidding

Another functionality update long overdue is the enhancement to bidding that will afford Advertisers the ability to adjust bids based on the user geography.  Instead of having to duplicate your campaigns with unique geographic targeting options to leverage the findings in your Geography reports, Advertisers will now be able to apply a bid modifier to increase their bid by X% to be more aggressive in markets where consumers are more likely to convert.  Given modifiers will be applicable at the targeting level of the campaign setup; it offers Advertisers the ability to integrate their offline target marketing strategies with the online marketing environment.

Cross Device Attribution

As search users have become more platform agnostic, not to mention their workplace user behavior versus their personal behavior, tracking latent performance has become increasingly challenging.  A user can begin their search at work using their company-issued laptop in the morning, the user then double checks something later in the day using their mobile phone and finally converts that evening at home using their tablet.  Even more challenging for Advertisers is when the individual clicks on the paid search ad on their work computer, but when they come home, directly visit the website or click organically, resulting in the  loss of all conversion attribution to paid search.  While details are light regarding how and when Google will implement this, it is a move in the right direction to assist advertisers with identifying the true return on their investment from their advertising dollars and bring visibility to conversion lost due to search behavior patterns.

Thankfully, these non-industry working pundits that are somehow experts on our industry are all wrong.

Cyber Monday is real and its now going away anytime soon. ComScore showed in 2011 that sales on Cyber Monday rose 25% over 2010, increasing from $1B to $1.25B. This year, projections by ComScore forecast a 20% increase in sales on Cyber Monday for 2012. Since when did 20% growth signal the death of a promotional sales strategy?   Imagine the stock price jumps Wal-Mart or Target would see if they posted such year over year growth numbers at store front?

The reality is Cyber Monday is here to stay just like every other manufactured sales promotion like Valentine’s Day or Columbus Day.  The difference here is Cyber Monday has a much more powerful draw than those other manufactured sales promo days – online only retailers whose goods cannot be purchased anywhere but the online sales channel.  Due to that unique selling proposition, those pundits can bet their houses that Cyber Monday will continue to grow at a double-digit growth in the immediate future.

Cyber Monday marketers can find confidence in how consumers are engaging with the web and embracing Cyber Monday is an independent shopping experience.  Leading into 2011, Cyber Monday was a day for shoppers that lost out in the shopping cart races down Toys ‘R Us aisles looking to find that item that had vanished from the shelf.  In 2011, that behavior changed.

ComScore’s research showed shopping spend by time of day dramatically shifted.  The level of spend occurring between midnight and 9am increased by 300% year over year.  This suggests consumers have embraced Cyber Monday as another opportunity to get a great deal from a host of different retailers.  No longer are disappointed brick-and-mortar shoppers looking for a solution to their missed sale opportunity. They are seeking out online-only specials unavailable elsewhere.

The moral of the story for online marketers: Don’t take strategic advisement from journalists that have not walked a day in your shoes.  Cyber Monday is alive and well.  And with growth of the viral effects of social media, no major slowdown should be expected in the immediate future.  Just simply log into your Facebook or Twitter account this morning to judge for yourself.

For those not clued in on the news, Google senior execs made the decision to automatically update the Rotate Evenly setting applied to a campaign by an Advertiser to Optimized For Clicks after 30 days being untouched.  Their public relations push is that this clearly helps Advertisers because it increases their click rate, thus improving the quality score and leading to a lower CPC for the Advertiser. It has nothing to do with making money for Google, they just want to help Advertiser get on the right track. In summary, Google knows better how to implement your strategy simply looking at numbers and knowing nothing about your business or your customer.  Click rate is king!  Quick, somebody close the windows because the copywriter is going to jump.

Google for years has beat the drum that you must at all cost achieve the highest click rate possible for success.  Their own best guidelines encourage Advertisers to look like one another with an over focus on relevancy.  That very direction from Google is a violation of the long standing principle taught in the first day of Marketing 101 class that success is driven by standing out from the pack and developing a unique selling proposition.

Why does Google recommend this cloning of ads?  Very simple, they are the party in the transaction that benefits the most.  If every paid search ad looks the same, the consumer is forced to click on multiple ads to find the proper solution to their problem.  Google wins by offering multiple relevant results for a good user experience and the cash register rings multiple times.  The Advertiser is then left to chase the conversion.

What savvy marketers have learned is the highest CTR ad is typically not the winning ad when it comes to achieve ROI and sales volume objectives.  Any search marketing ingenue can generate clicks by loading up the copy with keywords for relevancy.  The experienced marketer is the one that understands how to write ads that limit window shoppers and draws in more qualified visitors.  A good ad copy testing strategy will often show that the 2nd or 3rd best CTR is more conducive to a higher conversion rate than the top click recipient.   That increase in conversion rate will easily offset any incremental CPC increases that Google may toss your way.

But most concerning is how Google’s actions interfere with testing efforts.  For any marketer that has conducted expansive ad copy testing, rarely are you able to learn anything in 30 days.  Reason for that is that statistical relevance cannot be achieved until a certain volume of observations are obtained.  If the Advertiser has built out a substantive Ad Group structure, it will take months, not weeks to achieve statistical validity.  While Google defends these concerns in that their optimize for clicks approach would only shift things in the near term to “60/40″, this invalidates the testing and frankly, optimize for clicks rarely does a “60/40″ when you have a thoughtful ad copy strategy.  In summary, Google is dismissing 30+ years of tried and true direct marketing best practices by eliminating a controlled A/B split test environment.

So, if this is the case, why is Google doing this?  Very simple folks, revenue achievement for Wall Street.  As we’ve come to learn in recent months regarding former employee complaints about a “changing culture” since Eric Schmidt’s departure, the focus at Google is changing.  Its now about what changes can we make that are sweeping enough to move the needle on revenue.  The Ad Rotation change is about revenue, forcibly pushing unsavvy small businesses towards ad units that generate more clicks regardless if it is beneficial to ROI.  Small business represent the biggest chunk of Google’s revenue and that is where the focus is at.

For the savvy marketer, don’t fear lack of control.  Thankfully, Google left a loophole for us all to continue down our path of choice.  To maintain our choice and override Google, we just need to simply switch ads to Optimize for moment and then revert them back to Rotate every two weeks to ensure we are inside the update intervals.  If you don’t want Google making decisions on your behalf and you want to maintain testing control, its just a little more work to add to the schedule.

It appears we were all wrong.

On this past Halloween, Google initiated a dirty trick that has been no treat to Advertisers.  Google clearly attempted to lull search marketers to sleep for two weeks hoping we’d forget about their decision and let the negative feedback simmer before they attacked.  On 10/31, Google began opening the flood gates and the data we’ve been using to deliver higher ROI was washed away.

Overnight, Advertisers were greeted with a 500% increase in “Not Provided” traffic on Halloween.  We have subsequently seen 30% and 15% traffic volume growth in the following weeks with no end in sight.  What many industry pundits thought would not be a major issue now appears to be on its way to becoming a powder keg.

Since Google unleashed its fury on Advertisers, the percentage of unknown traffic quickly moved into the double-digits, but it has gone beyond even the most aggressive predictions.  For the week beginning 11/13, we saw across our client base that 18.3% of all traffic details were being cloaked by Google.  Our maximum rate seen on any one website was 20.14% and the lowest rate seen was 11.89%.  Most concerning is that every website saw its Not Provided traffic grow each week and there is no sign of slowing.

While the acceptance of Google+ by online users grows, the situation will grow worse.  Advertisers can expect that as much as 50%, if not more, of their Google organic keyword performance visibility will be lost.  Google can continue to insult our intelligence all they like, this is not about privacy, but instead a brazen attempt to corner all the data on the market and make Advertisers pay Google, and only Google, to violate the user’s privacy.  If Google was seriously interested in protecting user privacy, they would automatically log out users similar to the banking industry and require proactive behavior by the user to sign in again.  By allowing users to stay logged in forever, Google has shown its motives to the business community and no matter how many people they trot out there to say they are the good guys and its about privacy protection, we aren’t buying what your selling.

At some point, the government will wake up and realize the damage that these anti-competitive actions have caused to Advertisers and online users alike.  If you are a gambler, place your bets on a date after November 2012.  Until then, Google will be laughing all the way to the bank.

Google’s rationale behind the move?  “Protecting user privacy is important to us, and we want to take this opportunity to explain what the Google Analytics team is doing to help you continue measuring your website effectively in light of these changes.”  Yes folks, Google now wants to be the protector of our privacy.  Let us all take a moment and share some internet messaging shorthand responses: LOL, ROFL, BMGWL, DNPMPL and LMFAO…emphasize the F.

Lets be serious, this is no effort to protect the privacy of its users.  If it were, Google would have applied similar rules to its paid search and non-logged in user query data. It would also set the “login cookies” to expire in no less than 30 days rather than leave vulnerable login information available.  Its privacy for a profit.  The goals of Google here are multifaceted:

• Force more Advertisers to play ball and pay for search listings
• Limit the behavioral targeting firms from developing competitive data sets
• Become the centralized controller of all online user data

The ramifications for Advertisers are very serious.  While Google Account logins are sparse today, representing approximately 10%-15% of the online community, Google’s internal focus with it projects +1 and Google+ are aimed at getting users to login and stayed logged in constantly.  These new projects are aimed at getting people socially engaged with limited barriers to entry where consumers are readily agreeable to signup and Google can in turn build a profile on the user which today it is currently lacking.  If Google is able to gain wider user acceptance of these new projects as compared to the massive user acceptance failures they’ve experienced with Google Checkout, Google Chrome and Gmail, their coverage of the user community could easily grow to 50%-60% in 18-24 months.

That’s when it gets scary.  Take a minute and think about how you are going to optimize your website for SEO success when you are missing 50% of the data.

The actions by Google are just another show of arrogance it has consistently displayed to the hand which feeds them.  They don’t need or care to respect the desires of its stakeholders because of its market share dominance.  They  know we have nowhere else to go, so you’ll just have to suck it up.  Just review the comments online from Advertisers and Webmasters, tens of thousands of negative responses.  Even the CEO of NetFlix got more support than this with his Qwikster idea before he capitulated on a bad business decision that outraged his stakeholders.

The reasons behind Google’s actions will obviously play out over the next year.  The best hunch is that this appears to be a clear sign that Google is marking their territory like an aggressive stray cat y limiting competitor data collection.  By not limiting their own data collection or limiting the length of the data collection on dormant user, this isn’t about privacy.  Its about Google knowing more than anyone else about users, which is deeply concerning for both competitors and customers.  Nobody wins in this battle for data supremacy, except for Google, and its stinks of anti-competitiveness.  In the meantime, Google is laughing all the way to the bank.

While it is wishful thinking, it would great to see a revolution on the web akin to what we are seeing with individuals who have been suppressed around the world by domineering leaders with no concerns except for their own well being.  Here’s hoping that a viral wave will catch on where Webmasters and Advertisers alike place script code on their website that identifies traffic from manipulated Referring URLs users and prompts visitors with the following message: “Google Is Tracking You, Click Here To Log Out Of Google”.

The one thing Google doesn’t control is our ability to warn users and advise they sign out.  Here’s hoping for a revolution.

So what is a marketer to do?  Should I or shouldn’t I apply Google’s Ad Extensions?

The biggest challenge for every marketer in choosing to apply Google’s Ad Extensions has been dealing with Google’s faux pas in placing the feature on the campaign level of their hierarchy.  To implement Ad Extensions, an advertiser must make significant changes to their campaign, often requiring exponential campaign creation and extrapolation.  The campaign is supposed to just allow marketers to control their budget, manage their targeting and direct how they wanted high-level functionality (network distribution, ad rotation) to work on their campaign.  It was never intended to drive relevancy, but that is the conundrum facing marketers due to Google’s misstep in their technical development.

We recently dug in with our clientele to do the heavy lifting and figure out exactly how effective Google’s Ad Extensions were in delivering ROI.  It was no easy task given the manual work entailed for setup and that Google still doesn’t offer API connections to SEM platforms for Ad Extensions.  The increased clicks that Google touts in selling the feature are a self-fulfilling prophecy because more links means more real estate which means more clicks.  The goal of testing was to determine whether the incremental clicks being received are valuable.

Here are the highlights we found in our testing of Google’s Ad Extensions featurette Sitelinks:

• CTR for the combined Headline/Sitelinks unit increased on average by 60%
• Ratio breakdown of clicks were 94% Headline to 6% on Sitelinks
• Conversion rate to a lead/order for Sitelinks click was 40% higher than the Headline click
• Overall conversion rate declined by 14% for the overall unit

Our hypothesis going into the test was that Sitelinks would create substantial CTR improvements, similar to those in the Google brochures upselling the feature, but that the incremental clicks received would not be of the same quality.  Our tests proved that hypothesis correct, displaying that the incremental traffic being received converted at a rate 37.3%  lower than the control metric.  Additionally, the conversion rate for the Headline actually declined.

This substantially lower conversion rate is pause for concern for advertisers.  To achieve success, this means that the CTR% improvement has to improve your Quality Score high enough to offset that decreased conversion rate, and needs to increase by a blended rate of 14% to maintain similar ROI performance figures.  For most advertisers, this means that Sitelinks are not going to be the right decision for your campaign based on a simple view of just ROI outside of your brand terms.  In our testing, we found situation where sometimes the CPC change was substantial enough, but in other cases it wasn’t.  Hit and miss.

We did find some interesting secondary findings within the test that we were not expecting.  The most significant finding was the impact that Sitelinks simply being enabled had on keywords that prior to the test maintained average positions between 3.5 to 5.0.  As advertisers are aware, Sitelinks are currently only displayed for top-positioned ads, so evaluating performance difference between terms with top-positioned versus side-positioned ads is key.

Our testing found that Sitelinks being enabled had a significant influence on improved Campaign and Ad Group level Quality Score, which helped influence CPC and Average Position for terms in the underlying campaign that weren’t in the top-positioned spots that would allow for Sitelinks to be triggered.  In summary, Google’s algorithm choose to improve average position for historically side positioned ads to a top-positioned status so they could display the Sitelinks that would increase the CTR.  This improved position was achieved often without increasing CPC to achieve that new position.  For marketers, this is coup of grand proportion as it has been well documented the increased ROI and consumer consideration that is provided top-positioned ads.  Our findings showed that gains achieved by getting your ads moved up the board for no additional cost could offset some of the declining ROI for terms that were already in top-positioned spots prior to Ad Extensions application.

Google’s Ad Extensions, and particularly the Sitelinks featurette, appears to have some pros and cons for marketers to consider.  Our research is suggesting that if you are already top positioned, you’ll get incremental volume but there is no guarantee that you’ll get the CPC savings necessary to offset the lower quality clickers that are going to come by for some window shopping.  And if you are expecting lots of clicks on those specific Sitelinks, think again.  But if you look outside the box, there is a potential huge upside if you have many ads riding in the top right positions of 3.5 to 5.0 to get a boost in position without a CPC increase along with exponential clicks.

Long story short, give Google’s Sitelinks a try and make sure that the incremental traffic is what you hoped for.  Placing it on your branded terms appears to be a no-brainer, but after that, results are going to vary depending on your marketing landscape.  At a minimum, its worthy of testing given someone else success.

And when you have a moment, send a complaint to Google to get off their pittypots and place Ad Extensions at the hierachy level they belong.  Ad Extensions need to be integrated at the Ad Group level like Keywords and Ads to gain proper relevancy rather than the foolish decision to place it at the campaign level that has disabled their use with standard reporting and SEM platforms and increased the potential for window shopping due to consistent irrelevancy in cooperation with the keyword search and ad copy served.

Here’s our rundown of this year’s best and worst Super Bowl Ads for integrating the web into their commercial spots:

Winners

GoDaddy - It has become an annual coronation as Bob Parsons has done it again, and in the process this year, to it up to another level.  Typically, the GoDaddy.com ads are just crass spots for the purpose of being crass.  The kickover to the web is more for crass shock appeal.  This year, GoDaddy.com added a comedic angle with Joan Rivers that helped them take the crown.  At some point, other Advertisers are going to eventually read the case study on successful web integration that GoDaddy.com re-writes each year.  Another standing ovation to Bob Parsons for continually showing us how to create a winning Super Bowl ad and impact your business tremendously each year.

Cars.com -  A surprise this year was Cars.com and its two solid 30 seconds spots.  With a sprinkle of humor, Cars.com effectively communicated with consumers about the value proposition it offers to it consumers and informs them to find out more about vehicle reviews at Cars.com.  The spot becomes even more valuable given the complete bungling by just about every car manufacturer that dropped the ball this evening by not expressing the product specifics around it vehicle models.  Great spots, good timing and great web integration.

GroupOn.com - Another big Super Bowl ad winner.  The social shopping upstart doubled-down when the timing was right.  If you are going to spend $3 million, you want to bring awareness to a high growth industry vertical in order to bring it to maturity.  GroupOn did just that with its interesting spot featuring Timothy Hutton playing on goodwill to Himalyan countries with a comedic u-turn that is was a restaurant discount.  The spot effectively pushed people to their website and you can be assured they will obtain 1 to 2 million new email addresses captures that they can turn into customers.  Only negative is that competitor Living Social one upped them with a better spot that they position just before kickoff where ads cost significantly less for about the same number of eyeballs.  Either way, both were big winners this evening.

And as usual, all the movie production house nailed it with their ads.  Quick hitting trailers that reached a massive audience and pushed people into the movie websites to view the full trailer and other spots from the movie.  The movie productions have mastered the Super Bowl ad push and just seem to get more fluid with their integration and use of the web each year.

The Losers

Auto Manufacturers – When are these companies and their agencies going to read basic research about how consumers shop before the purchase?  Depending on the research study you subscribe to, anywhere between 60% to 75% of consumers do research online before they purchase a car.  It is that figure why Cars.com plunged $6 million into Super Bowl ads, although they probably banked on those huge Madison Ave agencies to fumble the ball once again this year.  The standout loser of the bunch was Volkwagen/Audi, whose agency appeared to forget it was marketing its clients brand rather than its competition, forgot to mention a website URL and then marketed their client’s brand on Google search results while spending ad dollars to help promote YouTube.com.  My gosh, was the agency so lazy that they couldn’t create a splash page on the Audi or Volkwagen websites and embed the YouTube video? Triple whammy stupid by an agency that was clearly aiming for a “Betty White Moment” for self-promotion rather than generating sales and customers for its client. Mercedes got $3 million in free advertising…smart move!  That’s same agency’s misstep with tge VW Darth Vader was monumental as well, as I learned the Passat has an automatic starter.  Where can I find more info on the other features in the care that actually matter to a consumer.

Facebook Integration Missteps – PepsiMax, BudLight, Budweiser, Lipton’s Brisk and Skechers all made feeble attempts to drive fan page sign-ups and interactions as their call to actions.  As good as Kim Kardashian derriere looked in that Super Bowl ad spot, you need a little more reward on the backend (no pun intended) to get the consumer engaged.  Lipton’s was the big winner, turning in 11,000 new fans, while Skechers scored 4,000 fans.  Bud Light, Budweiser and PepsiMax each had generated less than 3,000 fans just hours after the game.  While these Brands should be given kudos for their attempt to integrate Social Media, they need to focus on giving the visitors something of value when they get there.  We aren’t going to “Like” you if you don’t give us a reason to.

ETrade - It is time to stop resting on the laurels of a winning spot and become a little more creative.  The babies were cute for about 15 minutes, but seriously lets flex some creative muscle.  We get it, ETrade thinks their system is so easy a baby can do it.  The spots simply just don’t do a good job anymore of presenting the ETrade business value proposition. What else do you got, why should I signup?  I tried to find those educational videos Enzo watched, but couldn’t find them on the website. How can I confirm if it is that easy if you aren’t giving me any tools except a link to replay the commercial to tease me about these education videos that allowed Enzo to retire!

On the whole, Advertisers are getting smarter and better at taking advantage of integrating the web to their ads. Six years ago, about 50% were getting a URL in their ads, where this year we see 90% had URL inclusion. That’s in itself is a big step forward. The biggest issue is still delivering something of value to the consumer if you ask them to visit you. GoDaddy.com, Cars.com and GroupOn.com delivered on that promise and are the case studies to follow that will reap the greatest return from their $3 million investment.

We are getting closer, but until Madison Avenue absorbs the fact that the web matters, we will continue to fall short of that 100% web integration goal. And even if we do get there, Madison Avenue needs to smell the coffee that flatulating on a Facebook page doesn’t deliver an ROI otherwise web integration with the Super Bowl will continue to fall flat.

The life of the email marketer is a challenging sort compared to their colleagues in display advertising and paid search marketing.  For display advertisers, its mainly about snazzy creative and engagement.  For paid search marketing, its about targeting, relevancy and delivering the user’s expected website experience upon the click.  For the email marketer, they must bridge all of these components together and then beat the goaltender that is mining the email service provider goal to deliverability.

A new wrinkle has begun to emerge in the email space that many have overlooked this past year and into the holiday season.  While email marketers were evaluating their content for spam trigger words, balancing their images to copy ratio and ensuring that they had their opt-out message included, Web 2.0 swept in with a monkey wrench that is redefining email marketing.

Web analytic tools are providing richer data than ever and it is becoming imperative for email marketers to integrate their campaigns for deeper review.  In reviewing our clients’ web analytic accounts, our agency found an amazing growth trend in the use of mobile devices, particularly with email.  Annual % of traffic increases for internal email campaigns ranged from 127% to 508%, with actual percent of traffic from those using a mobile device interacting with email ranging now standing between 4.09% to 15.18% in late 2010.  The use of mobile gets even more interesting when evaluating acquisition email efforts, as we saw % of traffic rates range from 26.2% to 64.3% across different advertisers and vendors.

These trends suggest it is imperative that email marketers begin thinking about Web 2.0 if they have no already done so.  These are monument shifts in a one year period, being driven most predominantly by consumer acceptance of iPhones, iPads and comparative mobile device offerings.  Mobile devices appear to have finally reached the “tipping point” of user acceptance. And with this holiday season, there is no doubt that iPhone and iPads are going to be a hot gift which is going to climb mobile device usage to further heights in 2011.

Long story short, if you are using a landing page or website without mobile compatibility, the trend is clearly stating you are going to be causing your email marketing campaigns harm.  The New Year’s Resolution for email marketing in 2011 is going to be interoperability.

Alas, we had a near flawless integration with our agency clients over the integration testing period, but a few bugs did trickle out that impacted the financials of Advertisers.  The following are a few of the challenges we encountered that may help in shoring up outstanding issues on your end.

Testing Performance Blips

Beginning in the second week of August, we monitored some significant swings in performance data and validated within web logs that Bing had begun to serve ads on Yahoo.com.  Our performance began to shoot up and down as we saw 50% to 100% conversion rate swings for our clients on a week-to-week basis. Interestingly, when things improved positively in Bing, there was correlative drop in our Yahoo campaigns, and vice versa.  Our agency began to manage Bing/Yahoo performance on a shared basis shortly after identifying this.

What we also saw was that competitors of our clients, most using SEM platform technology, began make bid position changes due to these swings, changes which sent their bids lower while we hung tight.  By holding steady and not utilizing bid rules on our Bing / Yahoo campaigns during the integration timeframe, our clients enjoyed an average position boost of one position spot on average while actually paying 10% less for the improved position.

Long story short, if you had automated bid rules set and your position declined, it is probably sensible to push your bids back forward to re-establish your quality score in the higher position and restore your previous positioning.

Limited Details Left Many In The Dark

For whatever reasons, Bing and Yahoo made the decision that less information about the changes would benefits marketers.  As a gambling man, I am sure that wonderful decision was crafted in a lawyers office with a big pile of beans and a metal spittoon.  Communications from both Yahoo and Bing were confusing and those with access to an account manager really struggled to wrap their arms around what was happening.  Wouldn’t it have been exponentially easier to just tell people straight forward the following: “If you already have a Bing account that is optimized, please stop reading here…you are good to go”.  Instead, we got conflicting communications from the organizations.

For those that haven’t geared up their Bing campaign and are still not focused on it, you better get moving as the holidays are upon us.  Your best bet to get it going quickly  is to just translate your Google campaign over and lower you bids a notch…you’ll be good to go.

Complete Visibility Blowout

While this wasn’t widespread, we actually did encounter a major engineering blowout on one campaign that we manage during the week of October 18th.  Coincidentally, this campaign also was seeing the widest weekly conversion swings.  Our impression and click volume plummeted by 92% overnight inexplicably.  Upon digging in, we found that about 75% of the usual suspect competitors were also not showing up in ads just like our client’s campaign.  After running some reports, we determined the Adcenter system was only running our ads between 12am to 6am despite our 24/7 setting.

It took a week to resolve, but once again, this was a major issue if you are managing your campaign utilizing an SEM platform  management tool.  Garbage in means garbage out when the system only looks at quantitative factors.  If your campaign experienced any impression delivery drop-off, run some hourly-view reports and contact your AdCenter representative if you are experiencing problems to get this resolved.

The Dreaded Yahoo Search Arbitrage Network

I noted in my blog post back in August that the most tight lipped portion of the integration was the survival of the Yahoo Search Partner Network.  Nobody at Bing or Yahoo was seeking to divulge.  My hopes had been that Microsoft would live up to the pledge that was made when I attended the Seventh Annual MSN Strategic Account Summit back in May 2006.  During that conference in Redmond, we were promised that the new MSN Adcenter would be focused on quality and would forego network traffic from search arbitragers. It was a subtle, but obviously directed smack at Yahoo at the time.  But dollars and cents rule the day and if Advertisers aren’t swift enough to filter out fraud, clearly Bing’s doesn’t feel its their problem.

When Yahoo/Bing offered those online integration literature and tools, there wasn’t any directed recommendations telling Advertisers to make sure they carried over their excluded search arbitrager websites.  Yahoo offered Advertisers no ability to downloads those lists from their non-functional user interface or even a copy / paste function from the screen.  If you were excluding as many Yahoo Search Partners as we exclude, a freight train likely hit your campaign.  Upon complete kick-over last Tuesday, we found that for one of our campaigns, 85% of the traffic was coming from the Yahoo Search Partners, which defies any form of logic.

Within your Bing interface, the site exclusion module is buried within the Campaign settings sections.  One nice improvement over Yahoo is that you can add more than 500 sites in the Adcenter tool.  The sad situation is that we needed that functionality because there are more than 500 sites to exclude.  Additionally, Bing offers a publisher report that details the Yahoo Search Partner sites sending you traffic. Fortunately Bing has chosen to not protect the arbitraging fraudsters by revealing conversion rates.  Just look for those sites generating poor results, send them packing and your campaign will revert back to successful levels.

This week, LinkedIn did just that to its social network community users, signaling that generating revenue through advertisements and data collection of its users has proven to be not enough for the B2B social media stalwart.  If you missed it, LinkedIn began hiding the last names of 3rd level connections this week in hopes that hungry sales representatives and job recruiters would be willing to shell out $99.99 per month to get the last name of a prospective customer.

Yes, that figure is correct…$99.99 per month to get a last name.

Needless to say, this is a big swinging move by LinkedIn to try and generate revenue.  The powers that be in the corner offices at LinkedIn made the decision that it was okay to disturb the vast majority of LinkedIn users’ experiences to target revenue generation from a small sub-segment of users in the sales and employment recruitment job fields.  The idea seems woefully short-sighted and the likely backlash not commensurate with potential revenue gains.  LinkedIn appears to have forgotten why most people signed up…they want to be found for a connection, not the opposite.

As a person that is neither in sales nor recruiting, I utilize LinkedIn to let people find me.  I gave my information to LinkedIn specifically so people could find me.  Now, LinkedIn has changed the rules and has thrown up a big brick wall to stop people from finding me, unless those people want to shell out $1200 per year.  What this means is that if people aren’t finding me, I am going to be visiting their website less often.  And if I visit the site less often, that mean less site traffic and less revenue for LinkedIn via advertisements.

We must then as marketer consider how the site traffic change will impact the demographics of users at the site.  Part of the challenge today in advertising on LinkedIn is that there are too many low quality prospects representing a majority of the impressions.  These impressions belong to salespeople and recruiters that advertisers are not seeking to connect with.  Companies like Cisco, Ring Central, Business.com, Google and others are not seeking to engage with these valueless power users, they want to reach the business decision makers.  And with this change, LinkedIn might have just made it that much harder.

The attempt to charge for a person’s last name is about a low brow a tactic as you can get when the information was provided to you willingly under the guise that the user controlled what info was shared and which info was not.  LinkedIn just told its user community that it no longer has control over what is shared.  Companies like Hoovers and InfoUSA have made million dollar investments to collect their user information while LinkedIn now appears to have applied a bait and switch tactic by restricting its users’ rights on how its information can be shared now that they’ve reached a database that was viable.

I know for myself, when I agreed to LinkedIn’s Terms of Service Agreement, I didn’t have any expectation that LinkedIn would place limits on my information sharing for their financial benefit.  For myself, LinkedIn’s actions just lowered their brand image in my eyes, as profiteering off my information without my permission while at the same time restricting my use of the system doesn’t warm me up.  As a result, two B2B social platforms got a new customer today, Jigsaw.com and Naymz.com.  Those companies have LinkedIn to thank for my new patronage and the patronage of more future customers if LinkedIn doesn’t rethink it misguided decisions to charge for my last name.

It’s my last name LinkedIn, not yours.