Worse, captcha screens lacking a “generate another” link.

What is between the “h” and the “w” here? I have no clue.

Argh.

Driving in this morning, three random stories on NPR caught my ear as having a paid search angle.

(I couldn’t see how to link to the NPR audio directly. To hear these clips, click on the H2 links below, then click on “Listen Now” link. The text isn’t the transcript of the audio, just background info.)

Why Google Built Chrome

Renee Montagne asks Mario Armstrong, “How will Google make money from Chrome?” Armstrong suggests three answers:

1. Advertising.
2. Browser as new OS.
3. Monitoring user behavior to better target ads.

You missed the boat, NPR.

1. There is no advertising in Chrome. Web pages themselves carry the ads. All browsers display all the same ads (unless ad blockers installed).
2. Unlike Windows, Chrome is open source. Google is encouraging other browser teams to utilize their technology freely. Unlike Windows, Google doesn’t directly benefit from having coded Chrome — there is no lock-in.
3. Chrome does not send detailed browsing info back to Google.

Here’s how I’d answer Renee’s question:

1. Financial. Anything that makes web browsing easier leads to more web use. More web use leads to more Google clicks, on both search and content ads. More Google clicks leads to more Google revenue, profit, and market cap.
2. Web Evangelism. Google deeply believes in the transformative power of the internet. Anything that makes web browsing faster and safer is Inherently Good.

The Mortgage Bailout And PPC Bid Shocks

The Fed grabs control of Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae, and 30 year mortgage rates plummet 30+ basis points overnight. Wow.

What’s the paid search angle? For PPC advertisers, the conversion value of traffic on terms like 30 year mortgage likely just changed significantly, and it did so extremely quickly.

Statistical bidding systems use historical trends to predict what will happen next. The underlying assumption is that world is changing slowly, so the near future will resemble the near past. When the world is changing fast, extrapolations can miss the mark.

The solution? We here at RKG have long emphasized the importance of coupling strong algorithms with smart humans.

‘Bots handle the mind-numbing large-scale mechanics of tactical PPC infinitely better than humans. But smart people can react quicker to external strategic shifts than robots.

We’ve been auditing search financials for prospective clients now for years. Amazing, but even in 2008 we still see retailers overshooting or undershooting their key selling seasons (holiday, spring, back-to-school, whatever) by ceding too much control to the machines.

United Airlines Is Bankrupt

No, not really. Not this week, at least. But that’s what a small bond research shop in Florida believed when it misread the date on a stale Chicago Trib story about UAL’s bankruptcy from six years ago.

Hey, if you find it on Google, it has to be true, right?

Income Security Advisors pushed the “news” onto Bloomberg, and UAL promptly lost 99% of its value until trading was halted and the rumor corrected.

Boof.

Yet another example of the terrifying speed of the web, and the implied authority conferred by top spot on a Google SERP.

Yesterday, informal searching on Google for “Sarah Palin” returned a handful of semi-targeted AdWords ads.

Last night, a couple of searches showed no ads on her name.

This morning, I see a handful of (imho) appropriate ads — JohnMcCain.com, AbesBooks.com, etc.

These quick searches are far from scientific, yes. But I’m wondering: where are all the ads?

Speaking without data, I’d suspect AdWords is a familiar tool to every right-wing PAC, left-wing PAC, political t-shirt store, Alaskan vacation spot, and adult site.

Speaking without data, I’d wager many screenfuls of AdWords advertisers have already submitted their ads to trigger on Palin’s name, which was one of the most frequent searches on Google yesterday. If we could fly inside the Adwords database, I have to imagine those ads are waiting in there by the hundreds.

As a citizen, I’m pleased to see the Palin paid results free of crass commercialism, partisan attacks, and sleazy stuff.

As an AdWords advertiser, I’m curious as to how the Google editorial process works, such that these ads aren’t showing (if indeed they are not).

RKG specializes in serving online retailers; we’ve not done political SEM. Are the rules different? Are the rules public?

Interesting!

On a related theme, I’ve been toying with the idea of developing a new email client aimed at enhancing corporate productivity.

The entry level “bronze” level of my software would be your basic MS Outlook clone.

Corporations seeking increased productivity could step up to the “steel” level software , which would remove “BCC” functionality, mass distribution lists, and email themes.

For a slightly higher price, the “silver” version would in addition lose the ability to send HTML, to include attachments over 1Mb, and to “CC” anyone in the org chart higher than the recipient or yourself.

The “gold” level software would drop CC entirely, restrict the “To” field to at most three recipients, and automatically delete inbound or outbound email matching rumors on snopes.com.

The top-tier “platinum” version of the software would impose a quota on the maximum number of emails each user could send each week, would automatically delay angry outbound emails by 24 hours, and (here’s the killer feature) would allow users to check email at most thrice daily.

Verily, such software could cause corporate productivity to soar.

The HR person asked me this question, which I’d never heard and thought was great:

If you were to put the candidate on a two-person team, what strengths would you want the other team member to have to best complement the candidate?

Asking about what would complement someone best — what a super-nice and effective way to get at someone’s less strong areas.

Putting it in that positive way — rather than the conventional “Can you describe the candidate’s weaknesses?” — got me to think and to speak more more freely.

Polite. Smart. Effective.

Kudos to Baron Schwartz (RKG alum), on his just-published book, the definitive tome for high performance mysql.

Many congrats to the rocking RKG softball team, who won last night, and so ended the season in first place.

And the president is coming to town tomorrow.

From all of us here at RKG, we wish our readers a safe and happy 4th.

Apologies for sinking so low as to quote Fake Jerry on the Google/Yahoo deal, but damn Dan Lyons is funny!

But one thing that struck me is that I just found out today that the way AdSense works is we don’t actually know how much of a cut we’re getting. We just take their ads and run them on our site and they send us a check at the end of the month, and we trust them to give us a fair amount of whatever they were paid, though there’s no actual way to determine what a fair amount might be. I asked Eric Schmidt about it and he was like, Well, it’s kind of complicated and there are all sorts of variables in the algorithm that determine what a particular ad might be worth at any particular instant in time and it can depend on the search itself and then other variables like the context of the ad and the region where the ad was shown and how far along we are in that fiscal quarter and how close we are to making our numbers.

I was like, That can’t really be the way you do it. You mean you just pay whatever you want to pay, and we’re supposed to just accept that? Eric says, Hey, that’s how it works with everyone else. I started to ask a few more questions about how the algorithm works but Sergey jumped up and said look, it’s just really complicated and even if we explain it to you it’s going to take half a day and there’s no point anyway because the algorithm is constantly being tuned and adjusted so whatever we show you will be totally obsolete by the time we finish explaining it to you. Oh, and besides that, you’re the one who called up and begged us to save you.

Fake Jerry, 17 June 2008, Funny thing about our deal with Google

Hah!

Old SEL post: Google At $950 Per Share: Extreme Transparency

In the first half of her talk, Carrie presented industry stats from this year’s State Of Retailing Online report (SORO). Online retail is growing, search spend is growing, retailers send a lot of email, all the expected trends.

The second half of Carrie’s talk was more reflective. She apologized in advance for sounding overly Californian, then put up a slide of a woman doing yoga with the enigmatic title “Search Is.”

Her presentation was far more eloquent and insightful than my rapidly typed notes below suggest. Here my notes:

“Search Is.”

No missing word there. Not “Search Is…” but simply, in the eastern sense, “Search Is.”

Search is a market force, and for online marketing, search is the market place.

You may think search prices are crazy, but it is a marketplace.

Pushing against that force may not be the best way to optimize search.

To grow on any sort of scale, search is one of the only vehicles left.

The value has been squeezed out of affiliate and email.

It isn’t fair to compare affiliate and email to PPC as the former two are fixed costs — even if fixed percentage costs — rather than auctions.

Search is the only place to get the growth.

When consumers in a survey were asked “Where do you shop online most”, Google came in eighth (!!).

Too often Google searches a retailer’s site better than retailer’s themselves.

You can find “batman toddler crocs” at Zappos via Google, but not via a site search on “Batman” on Zappos itself.

Search. We can lament the high costs, but there is not much choice but to play along.

Retailers don’t like not to have choice.

Not having choice frustrates us.

GM committed to putting 50% of entire advertising budget in online within next three years.

A portion of that will go into search.

50% in three years. That is insane fast change.

But it is right, it is good.

Yes, it drives costs up.

But it is what it is.

Search is like Interchange fees — you don’t like paying those fees to VISA, but if you don’t take VISA, what are you going to do?

Without VISA, you don’t have a retail site.

Why? Because consumers want to use credit cards.

Consumers want to use search.

Lehman Brothers report:

Correlation between Google Gross US Revenues to US E-Commerce Growth: .96.

Correlation with Yahoo Display Ad Sales and US E-Commerce Growth: -.04.

From ICSC report, top two sources for new customers online are PPC at 35% and SEO at 18%.

Those are both search, and paid is twice organic. Take note.

Forrester data shows today consumers spend 28% of their total media time online, but only 8% of media spend is online.

Think about that.

Search is.

The price may not be great, but the price is fair.

Because it is the market.

If it costs too much, get out.

It is your choice.

Search levels the playing field.

Being a bigger company can be a disadvantage.

Bigger companies have higher fixed costs to cover.

Pure plays spend 10% of revenue on marketing, versus 5% for multichannels (SORO).

So you see pure plays being more aggressive in their advertising.

The Dali Lama says “Pain is inevitable but suffering is optional”.

[who] from Moosejaw says [inexact quote, paraphrasing] “I don’t mind if half my customers come from Google. If that’s how customers want to find us, that is what customers want.”

Search is.

– Carrie Johnson, Forrester Research
Shop.org Marketing Workshop, Scottsdale, AZ, 4/8/08

Carrie graciously agreed to an interview here on her views on the evolving role of search in online retail.

I’ll try to get links and exact stats and quotes for the cites above from her too.

Here’s the video:

video link

Here’s the page of links mentioned in the video: rimmkaufman.com/nemoa2008

This talk does not have any grand unifying theme. Rather, it is a random grab-bag of Marketing 2.0 ideas related to online retailing that I find cool. The intended audience was catalogers, so some of the topics or suggestions may be less novel to folks hanging out on the cutting edge of the blogosphere.

I recorded the talk and optimized the Camtasia recordings for Youtube. Boof — some sections were just a smidgen longer than YouTube’s 10 minute rule. So instead I put them on Yahoo’s JumpCut. That’s why the video looks like five sections spliced, and why the image quality isn’t great — it seems optimizing production for YouTube is less optimal for JumpCut.