You may have already noticed my new Google Talk badge in the sidebar. Pretty cool considering all you have to do is copy an iframe and paste it into your code.
Unfortunately, now I’m going to have to turn off my invisibility on Google Talk. It was fun while it lasted.
Popularity: unranked [?]
On Feb 28th Google AdWords is preparing to bring their new “automatic fast matching” out of beta. The whole idea sounds like a bad upgrade for users and a way for Google to make even more money. There are three things that really bug me.
maybe I’m being too harsh and I’ll feel better about this additional feature after I see the reports that are included. Right now, I’m not very anxious to give it a try.
Popularity: 100% [?]
The Microsoft AdCenter blog published this great illustration of the customer buying funnel. I have a hard time explaining this to businesses that I work with and illustrating the value of targeting different consumers in different steps of the funnel.
What makes this more complex is if you look at the relationships that exist in the B2B world. The fact that the consumers who may visit your site and design products are not the actual people who purchase the product for the company make this much more difficult.
At SES last year they discussed this phenomenon in one of the seminars on Landing Page testing. The business had their website configure more for executive and purchasers but when they targeted the engineers who designed and used their products sales went up gradually.
Additionally, the customer purchase funnel is a major component in contextual ad marketing and pricing. Perry Marshall suggests that contextual keywords on Google should be only 1/2 the bid of the same words in the search network. I altered the bids on one of my campaigns and found this to be absolutely true and saved a lot of money.
Popularity: 84% [?]
