Does anyone know if Google has agency discounts for US agencies? I know that they give a token promotional credit, but for an agency that manages a couple million dollars in advertising, that $100 promo coupon isn’t that exciting. The reason I ask is that they stopped doing it in Europe, and I wanted to double-check that they didn’t offer it in the US.

Yahoo! could start making some headway with an agency discount, I think that it would be a quick way to spur favor with agencies that don’t support them. Microsoft too. Currently, we don’t support Live because its hard to justify managing a 3rd-account to increase reach only marginally. You know what a game-changer would be? If Live launched a tool that grabbed your Google account, and recreated it perfectly in their system.

In any case, the article that spurred this is from a site called “SEM Report Card”, the story is here.

I have a major problem with Google playing high & mighty and scoring landing pages/sites and factoring that QualityScore into an advertiser’s minimum bid. Google has standardized the lion’s share of their advertising on a CPC-basis. The basic premise of a CPC pricing model is that an advertiser buys the visitor from Google, and are free to do with that visitor what they want.

I applaud Google for not allowing ads that link to pages with pop-ups, phishing sites, etc. They have certainly made the web a safer place to surf by imposing their limits. I was talking to a client about Google’s implied editorial endorsement. Your ad benefits from being in a box that says “Ads by Google”. Its a very easy way for Google to transfer some tiny bit of brand equity to your site. It says “Google has deemed your Ad good enough to run on our network”. Admit it, if Google opened a coffee shop or auto dealer in your town, it would immediately be the coolest lounge (for geeks) or the most fair car dealer. Everything Google touches turns to Gold.

However, with their post today on the AdWords blog, they are starting to show that its not about protecting their users (their “true north”), its about protecting their users for the right price. For me, this one line said it all “The following types of websites are likely to merit low landing page quality scores and may be difficult to advertise affordably”. You can still run your scams, you can’t just do it affordably. Or, read differently, we realize that your site is probably a scam, but we’ll still sell you a user if you pay us more.

If Google asked, and they have not, I would propose the following:

1. If you want to protect user experience, have a standard and stand by it. If its not good enough for Google, don’t run the ad, regardless of price. The user doesn’t know/care if Google charged $.10/click or $10.00/click.
2. If you are going to score websites, you should give them clear-cut guidelines on what you are looking for. If changes are made, allow them to see how that change affects their QualityScore either negatively or positively.
3. The min. bid could be high for a number of reasons, most are due to campaign set-up, structure, negative matching, ad text, etc. If those are the issue, fine. If its the landing page, alert us!
4. Come out with clear-cut details on how rich-media pages are scored. Is Flash positive for user-interaction? Is it a negative?

Would love to hear from other agencies out there - do you think that Google is being overreaching and under-informing?

There has been a lot of discussion lately about behavioral targeting and how it fits in to the targeting pantheon. Its an interesting discussion, because targeting is not the end goal, its using targeting to find people at the right time.

At Gupta Media, we use the term “Psychographic” targeting (new term under fierce discussion) for targeting users at the exact moment that they are thinking about a product. We see this online is during “search” activity, mostly on search engines, but it can manifest itself in different areas (i.e. reading white papers via a white paper syndication network like TechTarget). After psychographic targeting, we currently believe the next best targeting is “contextual” because if the content is relevant, their is an implication that the reader is interested in your product. A good example of this would be a person reading about running shoes, and Nike targeting them through contextual advertisements. They aren’t actively searching for Nike running shoes, but they are showing interest in running shoes. After contextual, we get into genre targeting (Nike running ads against gym ads, running trails, etc). Finally, the lowest form of targeting we use is demographic targeting (I call demographic targeting a “blunt” instrument). This is the most traditional form of advertising - Nike running ads that target men and women that are 18 -35 (or some other specific demographic segment).

So, the question becomes - where does “behavioral targeting” fit into this paradigm? Is it betweeen psychographic targeting and contextual targeting? If you watch users across sites, can you imply what they are thinking about ? Is it between genre & contextual, because contextual advertising has some definitely insight into a user’s current state of mind? Would love to know your thoughts.

Welcome to SearchParty! We had well over a 100 submissions for naming our blog. We chose “SearchParty” because its a whimsical name and a fun double-entendre. We’re hoping that the comments will be like a cocktail party of super smart people talking about online marketing & that, like us, you’ll always be searching for better ways to advertise your sites, artists, shows, movies, games, events and products!

On this blog, you’ll find postings on the search world, our thoughts on Google & Yahoo, online marketing, the music industry, usability, web trends, analytics and more.

We hope that you read, comment and if you are compelled to, please feel free to submit an opinion piece! We’d love it if you were part of our SearchParty!