1. Maintain or Decrease Cost – Identify ideas that might help you maintain or decrease your current spend.

3. Balance Cost and Traffic – Review a mix of ideas that are aimed at either increasing traffic or decreasing costs.

It has been a pretty busy month for the AdWords crew, it seems. The company recently added the ” Analyze Competition ” feature to the opportunities tab. They also launched a new click-to-call from Apps format, announced the Google Display Network, some changes to reporting, and the availability of sitelinks in all AdWords campaigns.

Google says advertisers who have used the format in the past have experienced big gains, and have boosted clickthrough rates by over 30% (on average).

“When a user’s query matches a keyword in your Ad Sitelinks-enabled seo campaign, Google will automatically determine if your ad qualifies to show Ad Sitelinks and whether to show the two-line or the one-line format based on the quality of that ad,” says Dan Friedman of Google’s Inside AdWords Crew. “Ads that currently qualify for the two-line format will not be affected by the addition of the new one-line format.”

“You should keep in mind that Ad Sitelinks is a campaign-level extension, so the links you create should be relevant to any ad in that campaign,” Friedman adds.

Advertisers can set up ad sitelinks for their campaigns by finding the option in the Campaign Settings tab in their AdWords accounts. It’s listed as “Show additional links to my site” in the “Ad Extensions” section.

“In the past, the most common way to measure how changes to your account affected your campaign performance was to measure how the campaign performed before and after you implemented your changes,” says product marketing manager Courtney Lischke. “However, this type of analysis can often be complicated by events that occur during the test period, including holidays, weekends, or changes to end user or advertiser behavior.”

“ACE allows you to perform faster, more accurate tests by executing your experimental campaign alongside your original campaign,” says Lischke. “By performing this type of simultaneous split test, we can tell you precisely if your campaign changes produce statistically significant results.”

Advertisers using ACE can measure things like the incremental impact of adding new keywords to their campaigns or changing keyword and ad group-level bids, the value of restructuring content campaigns to use more tightly themed ad groups, seo, the change in volume by using different keywords match types, etc.

The company says this is an effort to increase transparency, and will display the revenue shares right in the AdSense interface sometime within the next few months. While that may take a little time, they’ve still revealed the percentages as they stand right now.

“AdSense for content publishers, who make up the vast majority of our AdSense publishers, earn a 68% revenue share worldwide,” says Neal Mohan VP, Product Management. “This means we pay 68% of the revenue that we collect from advertisers for AdSense for content ads that appear on your sites. The remaining portion that we keep reflects Google’s costs for our continued investment in AdSense — including the development of new technologies, products and features that help maximize the earnings you generate from these ads. It also reflects the costs we incur in building products and features that enable our AdWords advertisers to serve ads on our AdSense partner sites. Since launching AdSense for content in 2003, this revenue share has never changed.”

“We pay our AdSense for search partners a 51% revenue share, worldwide, for the search ads that appear through their implementations,” adds Mohan. “As with AdSense for content, the proportion of revenue that we keep reflects our costs, including the significant expense, research and development involved in building and enhancing our core search and AdWords technologies. The AdSense for search revenue share has remained the same since 2005, when we increased it.”

At this point, Google is still not disclosing its revenue shares for AdSense for mobile applications, feeds, or games. The reason for this the company gives, is that these are still evolving, and they’re still learning about the costs associated with supporting them.

Google also says that revenue shares for AdSense for content and search can vary for major publishers with whom the company negotiates individual contracts. In addition, the revenue shares may change in the future, but they don’t have any changes planned yet.

Google has decided that instead of showing completely irrelevant ads in such cases, it will just dig back into another conversation from your Gmail usage, and show you ads related to that. This is illustrated in the clip below.

“Let’s say you’re looking at a confirmation email from a hotel in Chicago. Next to your email, you might see ads about flights to Chicago,” explains Gmail Product Manager Steve Crossan. “But sometimes, there aren’t any good ads to match to a particular message. From now on, you’ll sometimes see ads matched to another recent email instead. For example, let’s say you’re looking at a message from a friend wishing you a happy birthday. If there aren’t any good ads for birthdays, you might see the Chicago flight ads related to your last email instead.”

Google is careful to point out that it doesn’t store any extra information to show these ads. It just picks a different recent email to match. It’s all automated, and no humans are involved in picking the ads. The process is compared to Gmail’s spellchecker. Google also notes that no email or personal information is shared with advertisers.

The change will be rolling out over the next several days, so if you are still seeing ads completely irrelevant to any conversation you’ve had, you may not have the new system implemented yet.

News paper website visitors viewed 3.5 billion page views during the month, spending 2.7 billion minutes browsing the sites in more than 597 million sessions.

“The newspaper audience continues to expand as publishers aggressively capitalize on their investments in digital properties, adding robust features and launching new products to attract a highly valuable consumer audience,” said NAA President and CEO John F. Sturm.

“Advertisers who want to reach consumers ready to make purchasing decisions continue to use the trusted newspaper brand to ensure their messages are heard through the crowd.”

The Nielsen numbers come as early data from a MORI Research survey of 3,000 adults, indicates that newspaper advertising remains the leading medium cite by consumers in planning, shopping and making purchasing decisions. More than half (59%) report newspaper advertising helps them plan purchasing decisions.

The majority (82%) of newspaper readers took some action as a result of a print newspaper ad in the past 30 days: 61 percent clipped a coupon, 50 percent bought something advertised and 52 visited a store.

While the number are impressive, it’s no secret the newspaper industry as a whole continues to struggle. In March the Hearst Corporation announced it was ending the print edition of the Seattle Post-Intelligencer and going to an online-only publication. In February, E.W. Scripps announced it was shuttering the entire 150 year-old Rocky Mountain News.

source: http://www.webpronews.com/topnews/2009/08/05/newspaper-websites-pull-in-70-million-visitors-in-june

You know this history by now. Here’s what the companies have to say:

“This agreement comes with boatloads of value for Yahoo!, our users, and the industry, and I believe it establishes the foundation for a new era of Internet innovation and development,” said Yahoo! CEO Carol Bartz. “Users will continue to experience search as a vital part of their Yahoo! experiences and will enjoy increased innovation thanks to the scale and resources this deal provides. Advertisers will also benefit from scale and enjoy greater ease of use and efficiencies working with a single platform and sales team for premium advertisers. Finally, this deal will help us increase our investments in priority areas in winning audience properties, display advertising capabilities and mobile experiences.”

Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer said, “Through this agreement with Yahoo!, we will create more innovation in search, better value for advertisers and real consumer choice in a market currently dominated by a single company,” said Ballmer. “Success in search requires both innovation and scale. With our new Bing search platform, we’ve created breakthrough innovation and features. This agreement with Yahoo! will provide the scale we need to deliver even more rapid advances in relevancy and usefulness. Microsoft and Yahoo! know there’s so much more that search could be. This agreement gives us the scale and resources to create the future of search.”

Key Terms as highlighted in the announcement:

- The term of the agreement is 10 years;

- Microsoft will acquire an exclusive 10 year license to Yahoo!’s core search technologies, and Microsoft will have the ability to integrate Yahoo! search technologies into its existing Web search platforms;

- Microsoft’s Bing will be the exclusive algorithmic search and paid search platform for Yahoo! sites. Yahoo! will continue to use its technology and data in other areas of its business such as enhancing display advertising technology;

- Yahoo! will become the exclusive worldwide relationship sales force for both companies’ premium search advertisers. Self-serve advertising for both companies will be fulfilled by Microsoft’s AdCenter platform, and prices for all search ads will continue to be set by AdCenter’s automated auction process;

- Each company will maintain its own separate display advertising business and sales force;

- Yahoo! will innovate and “own” the user experience on Yahoo! properties, including the user experience for search, even though it will be powered by Microsoft technology;

- Microsoft will compensate Yahoo! through a revenue sharing agreement on traffic generated on Yahoo!’s network of both owned and operated (O&O) and affiliate sites;

-  Microsoft will pay traffic acquisition costs (TAC) to Yahoo! at an initial rate of 88 percent of search revenue generated on Yahoo!’s O&O sites during the first five years of the agreement; and

- Yahoo! will continue to syndicate its existing search affiliate partnerships.

- Microsoft will guarantee Yahoo!’s O&O revenue per search (RPS) in each country for the first 18 months following initial implementation in that country;

- At full implementation (expected to occur within 24 months following regulatory approval), Yahoo! estimates, based on current levels of revenue and current operating expenses, that this agreement will provide a benefit to annual GAAP operating income of approximately $500 million and capital expenditure savings of approximately $200 million. Yahoo! also estimates that this agreement will provide a benefit to annual operating cash flow of approximately $275 million; and

- The agreement protects consumer privacy by limiting the data shared between the companies to the minimum necessary to operate and improve the combined search platform, and restricts the use of search data shared between the companies. The agreement maintains the industry-leading privacy practices that each company follows today.

source:http://www.webpronews.com/topnews/2009/07/29/mirosoft-and-yahoo-finally-announce-deal