Gasta Tech Update: Google banned more than an estimated 30,000 advertisers

Gasta SearchMatch traffic increases
Ban of 5% of AdWords Advertisers Pointed to Strong Q4 for Google

On Dec. 3, Google banned more than an estimated 30,000 advertisers who utilized its AdWords system, according to Chicago-based AdGooroo. This was the equivalent of banning approximately 5.3 percent of active advertisers who use the system, yet AdGooroo saw this as a sign that the search giant would have a strong fourth quarter – and they were right.

Last Thursday, Google announced that it had made $1.97 billion, or $6.13 per share, during the final quarter of 2009. This reflected a huge increase from its $382 million in earnings during the same quarter in 2008.

Revenue in the fourth quarter was $6.7 billion, an increase of 17 percent from the previous year. According to BusinessWeek, analysts expect Google’s revenue to boom about 20 percent in 2010, up about 9 percent from 2009.

AdGooroo, which noted that Google has always had strong fourth-quarter showings, saw the huge ban of advertisers as a good sign: “It is unlikely that Google’s management team would permit such a wide scale ban to take place during a weak quarter, so this almost certainly signifies strong quarter over quarter growth,” the company noted in a press release.

About two days before Google announced its fourth-quarter results, AdGooroo looked at its ad coverage metric and found that worldwide ad coverage drooped by nearly 10 percent in December to 4.97 ads per keyword from 5.48 in November. This came after 12 months of steady increases, according to the company, which believed that “this small drop will be more than offset by strong ad revenues.”

AdGooroo also noted that the top 80 U.S. retailers Google spend increased 12.5 percent to $298 million in the fourth quarter from $264 million in the third quarter.

“While most retail categories were up, several sectors stood out as particularly strong, including traditional retailers (“bricks”), online retailers (“clicks”), clothing, shoes, furniture, and auctions,” the company’s press release noted. “Weaker categories included consumer electronics (down 4.2% in Q4), office products (down 13%), children’s goods (down 2%), and home décor (down 15%).”

Google saw a 5.30 percent drop in first-page advertisers in December, compared to a 1.96 percent gain in the same month in 2008. Yahoo! experienced a 4.87 percent drop, compared to a 1.35 percent gain in November. Meanwhile, Bing experienced a 4.16 percent drop in December.

Google led the way with 81.0 percent of worldwide advertisers, followed by Yahoo! with 26.7 percent and Bing with 11.6 percent in December, according to AdGooroo.

In December, the top 25 advertisers for Google included amazon.com, ask.com, business.com, eBay.com and zappos.com. Best-price.com, mapquest.com and maps.google.com all made new appearances in the top-25 list for Google.

“Mesothelioma” was the most expensive keyword in December on Google, with a maximum cost-per-click of $99.44, followed by “buy structured settlements” with $79.01, “asbestos law suits” with $78.10 and “conference calling companies” with $75.29.

On Yahoo!, the most expensive keyword in December was “lloyds tsb insurance” ($53.44), followed by “scotttrade” ($45.27), “loyds insurance” ($44.58) and “love film” ($40.20).

“Low apr student credit card” ($54.24) was the keyword with the highest maximum CPC on Bing in December, followed by “accounting degrees” ($54.04), “student credit card application” ($51.39) and “health and dental insurance” ($50.15).


by Jason Hahn

Gasta:Google Index of Gasta Search Network By popularity

Google Index of Gasta Search Network By popularity

Google index of gasta search network shows how effectively Gasta has maximised its global reach. Surprisingly on Google rankings Gasta Ireland lags behind some of the newer domains, while Gasta China, and Gasta India outperform even the UK Engine.





Google Index of Gasta Search Network By popularity

14,300 Gasta China

4,590 Gasta International

2,990 Gasta Japan

1,330 Gasta Europe

1,420 Gotagshare

1,420 Gotagspot

1,220 Gasta India

736 Gasta UK

397 Europasearch

395 Gasta Austria

363 Gasta TV

275 Gasta France

272 Baroneracing

263 Surfni

241 Gasta Germany

171 Gasta USA

232 Gasta Money

156 Gasta Spain

112 Gasta Ireland

101 Gasta Travel

19 Gasta South Africa



Yahoo Index of Gasta Search Network By popularity

(4,330) | Inlinks (426) Gasta International

1,764) | Inlinks (258) Gasta UK

1,458) | Inlinks (116) Gasta Ireland

(868) | Inlinks (51) Gasta USA

(806) | Inlinks Baroneracing

(530) | Inlinks (55) Gasta Europe

(410) | Inlinks (51) Gasta Austria

(359) | Inlinks (50) Gasta India

(312) | Inlinks (51) Gasta China

(261) | Inlinks (49) Gasta France

(247) | Inlinks (51) Europasearch


(243) | Inlinks (52) Surfni

(240) | Inlinks (51) Gasta Japan

(225) | Inlinks (49) Gasta Spain

(208) | Inlinks (49) Gasta Travel

(207) | Inlinks (51) Gasta TV

(110) | Inlinks (48) Gasta Germany

(101) | Inlinks (49) Gasta Money

(5) | Inlinks (45) Gasta South Africa

3) | Inlinks (41) Gotagshare

(5) | Inlinks (45) Gotagspot

(2) | Inlinks (9) Gasta Italy

Gasta Long tail keywords

Keywords can be split into two main groups, short tail keywords and long tail keywords, or broad keywords and narrow keywords. The term ‘long tail’ was coined by Chris Anderson and is used to describe the strategy of targeting less-competitive niche markets rather than the hugely competitive broad keywords. A long tail keyword is something like ‘Small Business Web Design’ while a short wail keyword is something like ‘Web Design’.

When you compare the two keywords, ‘Web Design’ has about 30 times as many competitors as ‘Small Business Web Design’ but ‘Web Design’ also gets far more searches each month. A small number of broad terms such as ‘Web Design’ and ‘Marketing’ account for a large proportion of searches but an equally large proportion of the searches are made up of millions of more specific search queries such as ‘Small Business Web Design’. This search distribution can be understood through the following graph.

Long Tail
A real life example
I speak about www.NarutoWallpaper.biz a lot and I will speak about it again in this article, each day NarutoWallpaper gets over 1000 visitors from search engines from roughly 200 unique keywords but the best keyword brings almost 50% of those visitors, following is a list of the top 12 keywords. Notice that the first keyword brings 45%, the second keyword brings 20% and the remaining 198 keywords account for the remaining 35% of the searches.

Keywords List


This distribution seems very similar to the graph I displayed earlier, the top few keywords account for a lot of the searches but there is many, many more specific searches which cumulatively total a significant figure. Let me display the keywords in graph form.

NarutoWallpaper Long Tail


You can see that the top two keywords bring in lots of traffic and the remaining keywords each bring minute amounts of traffic that cumulatively totals a significant amount, but separately are not significant.
Benefiting from the long tail
You may be wondering why anybody would want to target hundreds or thousands of keywords which bring only small traffic. Well the answer is simply that there is less competition so you can rank on the first page of Google for long tail keywords far easier than ranking for short tail keywords. Yes, they don’t bring a lot of traffic separately but if you target lots of long tail keywords you can get lots of easy traffic. Not everybody is capable of ranking highly for highly competitive keywords but anybody(!) can rank for long tail keywords.

Another benefit of long tail keywords is that the visitors convert amazingly well to sales and ad clicks. The visitors searching for long tail keywords know exactly what they want, be it ‘Small Business Web Design’ or ‘Half Price Armani Suits’, they know exactly what they want and hopefully you can provide it to them.

To put this into numbers, in general my websites might make $5 per 1000 impressions but from long tail visitors I can earn $100 per 1000 impressions, that’s 20 times the revenue if the traffic is equal. Although admittedly the traffic is not equal, my best keywords bring in more visitors than the long tail keywords combined, but the long tail keywords still bring in nice revenue.

On this website I have two pages providing free business resources: Free Business Card Templates and Sample Marketing Plan and Marketing Plan Template. Both are targeting long tail keywords such as ‘DJ Business Cards’ and ‘Massage Business Cards’. Those two pages make a lot of revenue per 1000 impressions but currently have low traffic. The keywords I am targeting are very specific and the visitors are getting what they came for so they convert well.
Conclusion
Whether you can achieve high rankings for competitive keywords or not, long tail keywords could be highly beneficial for you. If you have a website selling ‘Armani Suits’ but can’t pull any search engine traffic, rather than targeting the keyword ‘Armani’ or ‘Armani Suits’ try targeting more specific keywords such as ‘Armani Mens Suits’. Hopefully you will see an increase in conversions and sales.

Popularity: 43% [?]

Gasta News:Internet feels the bite of Crunch!

Mixed News as internet feels the bite of Crunch!

A straw poll of media agencies from the NMA Top 100 Interactive Agencies 2007 guide found budgets are under pressure as marketers alter their media plans ahead of the potential economic downturn. The findings are in conflict with market predictions. A report by analyst firm Enders Analysis this week said UK online ad spends was set to grow...
Meanwhile automotive brands plan to stop using dedicated campaign sites as budgets tighten and consumer’s tire of fragmented content. Car brands including Mercedes and Land Rover plan to pull back from campaign sites for car launches, switching to a central online hub. Mercedes has launched a global online hub, built by Digital Annexe that will house all its brand activity. It has been built to incorporate video streaming, an easily updateable back-end system and increased promotional space....


Online Video's Short Shelf Life

On average, video viewer ship peaks early in a video's life-cycle.
Thursday 19th of June 2008 12:00:00 AM
We set out with a simple question: throughout the life of a video, do most views occur in the first few days and weeks or are they distributed randomly over time? Since Tube Mogul tracks millions of videos, we turned to the data and were surprised to find such a robust trend: viewer ship peaks early.
Methodology
Our sample includes data for views by day for 10,916 videos over a 90 day time period. In order to exclude casual creators of online video (i.e. "Mickey’s Birthday"), each video in the sample achieved a minimum of 1,000 cumulative views over the 90 day time period.
On average, videos are time-sensitive. Trends pointed out elsewhere, such as "evergreen" (non-time sensitive) content always fetching views or videos randomly "going viral," seem more of a rarity than an underlying trend in the data.

Gasta.com to offer white label Hosted Search Engine Solution

Gasta.com is gearing up to offer geographical regions, companies, cities, and industrial sectors the opportunity to launch their own geo-targeted and white label branded hosted search solution. You can launch the branded search engine in a matter of hours and select from a variety of advertising and content partner solutions such as Google adsense, pay per click, you tube,blinx, Mirago, Ikojo, Yahoo mobile, Msn Live, and virtually any other content partner you sign up for. The fine details are not fully finalized as yet but this is a thrilling development.

CTO of Gasta search networks, Stuart Manning said " This is were the SME sector can build their own search brand, we will provide them with the platform and they can take in content from whatever source to build and develop revenue streams, there is no search boxes involved, everything is white label to meet the needs of the sites owners, and they controll the content, this is another innovation in the fast paced web 2.0 search development sector from Gasta.com"

Gasta will also build in the contextual advertising platforms of SearchMatch and InstantAds so site owners and operators can sell their own advertising inventory to their own clients and customers., track statistics and offer reports. More To follow.