 |
 |
|
|
| A new advertising system has been
announced by Google. Instead of its now traditional
cost-per-click arrangement centered around Adsense and
AdWords, the company has introduced “Pay-Per-Action
— Pay only for actions that you define”.
The
new system will work by defining the action that you
want a user to perform when they visit your site, such
as signing up for your newsletter or purchasing a product.
Then you’ll set the amount that you’re willing
to pay when this action is completed.
The point of the procedure is that you’ll
only pay when a user clicks on your ad, visits your
site, and completes your desired action.
Pay-per-action
ads complement your current campaigns by providing
a new pricing model that extends your reach and allows
you to pay only when a defined action is completed on
your site. This beta feature is currently available
to AdWords advertisers in the United States on a limited
basis as part of our beta test.
As soon as Pay Per Action is released within the UK
we will update our services to provide this new and
exciting advertising method.
Click here for more information
about Pay Per Action.
|
|
|
|
|
|
| In
order to reflect the dynamics of the market, and to
help you maximise your return on investment, Yahoo!
Search Marketing will introduce a new minimum variable
bid pricing structure. This means that from January
19th, our bidding prices will start from as little as
£0.05*, which is great news for your business!
Please
note that minimum bids will vary by search term, with
the lowest bid price starting at £0.05*.
Yahoo!
Search Marketing is dedicated to providing world-class
online marketing products and services that drive highly
targeted customers to your business while allowing you
the greatest return on investment.
We
hope this new pricing will help you make the most of
your Yahoo! Search Marketing account and allow you to
drive even more highly targeted customers to your site.
Source:
Yahoo! Search Marketing Newsletter.
|
|
|
|
|
|
Internet
giants Google Inc. and Yahoo Inc. are testing a new
form of online advertising that encourages people to
pick up the phone rather than click on a link, lending
credibility to the "pay-per-call" ad model.
Most
search advertising currently uses an approach called
pay-per-click. Google and other sites auction the right
for a company's ad to appear next to search results
when somebody enters keywords, such as "flowers"
or "digital cameras." Advertisers pay the
search engine each time someone clicks on the ad link.
With
pay-per-call, users are instead directed to call the
advertiser, who is billed for each phone referral.
At
some sites, including Time Warner Inc.'s America Online
Inc., the customer must pick up a phone and dial the
number.
Google
is testing a variant in which users click on a phone
icon and type their number into a box. Google then dials
the user, who hears ringing until the merchant answers.
Google says the service is free for callers, even long-distance,
and promises not to divulge the caller's number to anyone.
Calling
the test "limited," Google spokesman Mike
Mayzel declined to offer more details.
Yahoo's
Gaude Paez said the company also was testing pay-per-call
but had nothing to announce yet.
"If
Google or Yahoo or both adopt this - and if one does,
the other will too - it blows the market wide open,"
said Greg Sterling, who tracks search advertising for
The Kelsey Group. "Quite a few advertisers will
try it out because these two generate enormous search
volume."
|
|
|
|
|
|
The US company will now hold a 40%
stake - and 35% of the votes - in the Chinese firm,
which runs the country's biggest auction and trading
sites.
The investment positions Yahoo to compete
with world auction leader eBay in a key market.
Chinese internet firms are in demand
after the rip-roaring flotation of search engine Baidu.com
a week ago.
The firm's shares have more than tripled
in value since the start of trading, to more than $90
a share.
Auction
rivalry
Yahoo is to merge its Chinese search
engine operations with Alibaba.
The Chinese firm, in which Yahoo is
now the biggest single investor - as well as the biggest
investor in the sector in China to date - employs some
2,000 people in the eastern city of Hangzhou.
It is best known for its online auction
site Taobao.com, as well as flagship trading site Alibaba.com
which helps small and medium-sized companies find customers
at home and abroad.
Its business model puts it in direct
competition with eBay.
Yahoo already leads eBay in Japan via
its relationship with Softbank.
Softbank - one of Japan's pioneer internet
start-ups, and now a success despite finding itself
in dire financial straits after the dot-com collapse
in 2001 - is thought to have helped broker the Alibaba.com
deal.
But Alibaba.com is also competing in
the field of online payments, an area in which eBay
has a huge stake thanks to its ownership of US payment
broker Paypal.
Online
surge
The Chinese government last month reported
that the number of people in the country using the internet
had reached 103 million, putting it second only to the
US.
Leading overseas companies have recently
been investing heavily in China's booming online market.
EBay paid $180m for Shanghai-based Eachnet
and US web firm Interactivecorp - which owns Expedia
- paid $168m for a majority stake in Chinese online
retailer Elong.
And online book retailer Amazon bought
Chinese rival Joyo for $75m.
|
|
|
|
|
|
Due
to high demand we are developing a new login area for
our Pay Per Click customers to access reports which
will include all keywords and how many clicks they have
had etc. Currently Optihost's reporting facility is
to give an email report focusing on the main keyword
phrases which have been most successful each month but
with the new login area we aim to offer a clearer view
of all keyword phrase performances to give the customer
a full view of the campaign progress.
An
advantage of this is the availability of monthly reports
from the start of the campaign offering the ability
to view previous month's reports.
Reporting will continue to be on a monthly basis depending
on top-up date and once this system is in place existing
customers will receive an email with their login username
and password.
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
The milestone comes a year ahead of
the telecoms company's own predictions and includes
broadband connections sold on by third party firms.
Lower prices and higher speeds
forced by strong competition among broadband suppliers
are thought to be behind the sustained growth in faster
net access.
The
figures suggest that soon more than half of all net
users in the UK will be on a broadband connection.
Prime minister Tony Blair, welcomed the announcement
and said that broadband was of vital importance to everyone
in the UK.
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
Due to a high demand we have introduced
6 new packages to cater for companies with an advertising
budget higher than the Gold Series and Google Options
1,2,3. The new packages which are now on offer can be
found by clicking here. The new packages have been labeled
the Platinum series which are to the value of £500.00,
£750.00 and £1000.00 per month. These packages
are the same as the Gold Series apart from the obvious
budget difference.
The other 3 packages have been kept
in order with the existing Google Option Packages and
have been introduced as Google Option 4,5,6. Again the
only difference is the budget.
Ultimately, the higher the package which
is chosen, the more traffic Optihost can provide and
therefore a noticeable increase in enquiries and sales
will occur.
A service which hasn't been advertised
which we do also provide is the management of Espotting
and Mirago. These services are a useful for anyone looking
for even more traffic than the Gold, Platinum and Google
Series of packages can produce.
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
Computer software giant Microsoft has
unveiled its new MSN search engine.
The home grown search site rolls together many of the
features and customisation tools seen on other search
sites.
Initially,
it has launched just a prototype, but the finished version
will be ready by the end of 2004.
Microsoft
plans to use the search site as a springboard to take
a significant share of the advertising market from rivals
Google and Yahoo. In July this year, Microsoft updated
and tidied up its MSN search page to remove unwanted
adverts and to speed up the returning of results.
That
search engine was based on technology provided by Yahoo
and Microsoft will soon drop that in favour of its own
home-grown search engine. Microsoft has been testing
this own-brand search tool since July and now has launched
a test version.
In
a statement Microsoft said its search engine returned
results from five billion web pages - more than any
other search engine. But this quickly won a response
from Google which announced that its index has now grown
to more than 8 billion pages.
Prior
to the Microsoft announcement, Google was only indexing
4,285,199,774 web pages. As well as a large number of
pages, the Microsoft search engine, which operates under
the MSN banner, also includes a number of features that
have already been seen on other search sites.
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
Gigablast announced today its recent
database expansion from 650 million webpages to over
1 billion. The new index also includes a comprehensive
refresh of webpages from the previous index. Gigablast
also recently unveiled some innovative, new search solutions
which are currently free to the general public and leverage
the increased index size. Among these are Dedicated
Site Search (DSS) and Custom Topic Search (CTS).
DSS gives webmasters the ability to
provide their website’s viewers with search capability
for the specific website being viewed. Additionally,
webmasters can provide root URLs to seed the spidering
process of their websites. Gigablast will spider their
websites in real-time at the rate of one page every
five seconds. With multiple dedicated clusters, Gigablast
can handle large amounts of DSS queries and webpages.
Until all of a website’s pages have been uploaded
to the dedicated servers, viewers may be directed to
Gigablast’s main index which likely has most,
if not all, of the website’s pages already indexed.
Visit GigaBlast here
www.gigablast.com
|
|
|
|
20th
December 2004 ::: Optihost Launch ExtraClicks |
|
Earlier
than scheduled we have launched a new web site: ExtraClicks.
ExtraClicks provides everything Optihost can but an
addition being our new Google Options Packages. Until
now we have been focusing on the management of Pay Per
Click services utilizing Yahoo, MSN, Altavista, Lycos
& Wanadoo. We have many requests for the management
of Google Adwords so now we will be providing these
new packages to cater for this. You can visit
the new ExtraClicks web site by clicking
here. |
|
|
|
13th
December 2004 ::: Auto Complete Google BETA |
|
Google's
Labs has popped out a new beta: Google Suggest. Google
Suggest looks like the regular Google search, except
as you type in keywords Google, surprise! -- tries to
guess what you could be typing.
Just start typing in your search words. As you type,
a drop-down window will show you possible searches for
what you're typing. I started typing in Elvis and got
listings for Elvis Presley, Elvis, Elvis Costello, and
even misspellings (Elvis Presly). To the right of the
suggestions are the result counts for each item. Move
your mouse down to the item you want, click, and the
search is run.
http://www.google.com/webhp?complete=1&hl=en
|
|
|
|
25th
October 2004 ::: New Look AOL Search |
|
America Online is quietly testing
a redesigned version of its home page. It seems they
are moving towards becoming a Web portal again.
The test page for the new design has
an uncluttered layout, fresh looking icons and a soothing
color scheme. All of this makes the page easy and pleasing
to navigate, and we like it.
The layout consists of information boxes
and the users can choose to fill them with different
content feeds, such as news headlines or local weather
reports. This opportunity for personalization will surely
be appreciated by the users.
Lately, AOL have been loosing a lot of dial-up customers,
due in part to the fact that the prices of broadband services
are dropping. So AOL needs other sources of income and
it seems they are hoping web search might be one.
http://startpage.aol.com/
|
|
|
|
10th
September 2004 ::: Wotbox Launches Country-Specific |
|
| Wotbox,
an independent search engine better known for its advanced
geo-targeting technology, launches eight country-specific
search properties.
Wotbox,
which displays a flag of the country of origin next
to each result on its search pages, is growing and has
launched a new search engine for eight major countries.
It
also offers many other advanced features including allowing
users to zone in and search only in their chosen country.
“The
logical next step on from this was to create a fully
localized version of Wotbox for each country.”
Says
Director Mike Nott, “We’re trying to give
international users more choice by providing another
local search option for them. We also wanted the interface
for non-english sites to be in the native language,
making it easier for local users.”
The
new country-specific Wotbox sites are for:
Australia
- http://www.wotbox.com.au
Canada - http://ca.wotbox.com
France - http://fr.wotbox.com
Germany - http://www.wotbox.de
Italy - http://www.wotbox.it
New Zealand - http://www.wotbox.co.nz
Spain - http://es.wotbox.com
United States - http://www.wotbox.us
United Kingdom - http://www.wotbox.co.uk |
|
|
|
15th
July 2004 ::: Google Toolbar Adds Keyword Browsing to IE |
|
| Google
has added a keyword based browsing feature to its toolbar,
allowing users to type words rather than URLs into the
Internet Explorer address bar and automatically see the
"most relevant" site for those terms. By default, words typed into the Internet
Explorer address bar trigger an MSN search, just as
if the words were entered into an MSN search box. The
new Google toolbar feature bypasses that functionality.
The feature is similar to, but not exactly
like the "I'm Feeling Lucky" button on the
Google home page, which skips search results and loads
the number one search result for a query into your browser
window. "It's a dynamic service that changes when
the web changes," said John Piscitello, Google
product manager. "I'm feeling lucky will always
send you to the same result. Browse by name will only
send you to the site it recognizes that the user wants
to go to."
When there is more than one relevant
website for a particular word or phrase, the user is
presented with a list of Google search results to choose
from.
The Browse By Name feature is only triggered
when words are entered into the address bar. Typing
a valid URL will still cause that page to be loaded,
as requested.
When Browse By Name is enabled, words
entered into the address bar will cause your cursor
to briefly flash with an icon with three colored balls.
As the underlying web page is displayed,
your search terms then appear in the Google Toolbar's
search box.
Google will be automatically rolling
out an update to existing Toolbar users over the next
few days. If you've already configured the Google toolbar
to be your default search engine for Internet Explorer,
Browse by Name will be turned on automatically. If not,
you'll need to turn the functionality on through the
Toolbar options. The first time you use the system,
a small popup window alerts you to the change.
To get the new version
now, download the toolbar and reinstall it. Make sure
that you check the box to "make Google my default
search engine and enable Browse by Name in my Internet
Explorer address bar."
|
|
|
|
Join our mailing list for the latest updates and news.
|
 |
|
|
 |
Optihost
can Optimise, Submit and manage your Pay Per Click marketing
campaign. We can submit to over 1000 engines and directories.
|
|
