Archive for December, 2008
Search Advertising Increases in uncertain times
The Global economy is in a down-turn. Mega-corporations are crashing. Currencies are slumping, and everywhere you turn, there is doom-and-gloom.
Despite this decline in global economies, it seems that online advertising is increasing, in the face of potential failure.
The Australian Internet Advertising Bureau suggests that 212 million dollars have been spent on online advertising in Australia alone during the first quarter of this financial year, growing 33% from the previous year.
This is an indicator of companies desire to attract new customers as revenues erode, and consumer confidence and spending falls.
It is also a testament to the faith that many companies now have in Search Marketing as a viable mechanism to attract customers, in uncertain times when accounting for every dollar is important, and measuring your success or failure is critical.
Search Advertising offers companies that peace of mind.
It is also important to remember that whilst Pay-Per-Click advertising can deliver a measurable and almost immediate return on investment, your dollars can often be squandered on higher numbers of clicks as customers are more price sensitive, and the fierce competition who are advertising in your space and increasing the cost of your bids to increase your customers.
Search King recommends to consider a two-pronged approach to search marketing, and that is to run PPC campaigns in the short-term, and a search engine optimisation project in the longer term, which should help attract customers, whilst lowering your spend in the months and years to come.
This article is brought to you by Search King.
Microsoft to rename search portal Kumo
It wasn’t long ago that some of us were doing searches in “MSN”, The Microsoft Network Search portal, but that brand that was originally Microsoft’s internet division seemed to be over-used, and sometimes confusing through various re-badged portals forged out of alliances between Microsoft and media outlets such as NBC (MSNBC), Channel Nine in Australia (ninemsn) and others, and so in 2007, Microsoft made a push for live.com to be it’s new flagship brand for search.
Microsoft’s Live brand seems to have outgrown search, and is labeled to a variety of it’s services, and the search for a new name may have been underway.
A recent article found on a blog site Microsoft has reported that the name Kumo has been suggested as the new name for Microsoft’s search portal.
There have already been issues with the naming rights for kumo.com, and the name had already been filed in the US Patent and Trademark office, so it may turn out that we’ll never put searches through Kumo.
One has to wonder how many more name changes Microsoft’s lesser used search portal will undergo before they settle on the one name permanently.
Microsoft trying to buy Yahoo! - again?
Talks re-emerged yesterday about a potential buy-out of Yahoo!’s Search business by Microsoft.
The London Sunday times reported that Microsoft was once again in talks to buy out the division of Yahoo! for $ US20 Billion, a much lower bid than previous bids of $47.5 Billion, which were withdrawn after Jerry Yang (then-CEO of Yahoo Inc) rejected the offer.
Representatives of both Microsoft and Yahoo! declined to comment, however a recent blog quoting high-ranking Yahoo executives suggest that the bid is just a rumour, and there are no discussions.
Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer confirmed there was no current discussions on the buy-out, but was still open to talks about buying the business out, and a large investor of Yahoo!, Carl Ichan who owns over 5% share of the company is pushing for the merger since Jerry Yang was removed from the Yahoo! executive team.
These are interesting times for Yahoo! and Microsoft, and there still remains a very real possibility that the two companies could merge in effort to build strength against the world’s leading search engine, Google.
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