AT&T Vs. Google On BT Battleground

Interesting inquiry that is worth following...

AT&T and Google have been battling each for years on net neutrality issues. Now, that feud is extending into a Congressional inquiry about behavioral targeting.
"Advertising-network operators such as Google have evolved beyond merely tracking consumer web surfing activity on sites for which they have a direct ad-serving relationship," AT&T stated to Congress in response to an inquiry about behavioral targeting and privacy. "They now have the ability to observe a user's entire web browsing experience at a granular level, including all URLs visited, all searches, and actual page-views."

In the letter, made public today, AT&T attempts to cast itself as a privacy champion compared to Google and other Web companies. "The largely invisible practices of ad-networks raise even greater privacy concerns than do the behavioral advertising techniques that ISPs could employ, such as deep-packet-inspection," AT&T wrote.

At the same time, AT&T also said that if it deploys behavioral targeting, it will first seek subscribers' affirmative opt-in consent. While that sounds like a big concession, AT&T obviously knows that at least some Congress members are heading there anyway; Rep. Ed Markey, at any rate, is on record as supporting an opt-in standard for ISP-based targeting.

Of course, AT&T, like other Internet service providers, has every reason to want to sell information about subscribers' Web-surfing activity to companies like NebuAd, who will then serve ads to users based on their history.

Google has every reason to want to prevent this from happening, as the company only stands to lose ad revenue to startups like NebuAd. If ISPs know which users are conducting searches for particular products, at least some marketers might decide they want to reach those users on sites other than Google -- which could result in a direct shift of ad dollars from AdWords to NebuAd and its ISP partners.

ISPs apparently have been waiting for an opportunity to get a share of online ad dollars for a long time. Two years ago, a Verizon executive complained publicly that Google was getting a "free lunch," on the theory that the company's profits from online advertising were only made possible by networks such as Verizon's.

So it makes sense that Google would try to frame the policy debate underway in Washington as solely about ISP-based targeting, while AT&T would try to characterize it more broadly, as about consumer privacy overall.

At the same time, there are some real differences between network-based targeting, which only operates across a limited number of sites, and ISP-based targeting, which operates everywhere. No matter how much information Google has about a particular user, an ISP will always have more.

Social Networks Surge On Growing Global Audiences

Facebook and other social networking sites are enjoying rapid growth worldwide, thanks to a surge in social media activity outside the U.S., especially in emerging regions.

One notable exception is MySpace, which Facebook surpassed in April as the world's biggest social network. The News Corp. property has seen its traffic stagnate both domestically and globally in the last year.

MySpace's flattening growth stems partly from a maturing market in North America, where social networking traffic grew only 9% for the year ending June 2008, according to comScore Media Metrix. Facebook's 38% North American growth even looks sluggish compared to its 153% jump worldwide, for a total of 132 million users as of June.

But elsewhere, social networking is taking off. Consider traffic growth of 66% in the Middle East and Africa to 30.2 million, Europe increasing 35% to 165 million and Latin America rising 33% to 53.2 million.

The comScore data roughly parallels findings presented in April by Universal McCann showing online social network membership in countries such as Brazil, Russia, Taiwan, and Mexico growing at more than 70% compared to less than 49% in the U.S.

Facebook has also benefited from launching an effort at the start of the year to allow users to translate the site into different languages. Last month, the company said it would also begin to allow developers to translate their applications into multiple languages.

MySpace began a push to offer localized, foreign-language versions of the site two years ago. But with only 3% growth in the last year to 117.5 million, it appears to have reached saturation.

Facebook's traffic has grown more than fourfold in Europe, Asia-Pacific, the Middle East and Africa, and Latin America. Its jump to nearly 12 million monthly visitors in Latin America from 1 million a year ago is especially eye-catching.

In some instances, Facebook's impressive stats abroad result from having a small base. Its growth tripled in Japan over the last year to 538,000 visitors, but Facebook is still getting crushed by homegrown competitor Mixi, with 12.7 million users. MySpace was second, with 1.2 million.

Hi5 has also benefited from rolling out its site in a variety of languages this year, doubling its audience to more than 56 million. Friendster, a social networking also-ran in the U.S., meanwhile boosted traffic 50% to 37 million worldwide.

Google's Orkut and AOL's Bebo also had strong gains--with 41% and 32% audience increases, respectively, in the last year. Neither has made big inroads in the U.S. market yet, however.

3 misconception of quality score

1. The first misconception of the Google AdWords Quality Score is that using different match types improves your Quality Score. The fact is match types have no effect on your quality score. According to Google, two types of quality scores are used. One is used to calculate your minimum cost-per-click bids and the other is used to calculate your ad position. Apparently, neither is impacted by match type. Furthermore, if you do have multiple match types for the same keyword in your ad group, all three match types should have the exact same quality score. The quality score for determining your ad position depends on the relevance of your keywords and a user’s search query. Your quality score is often higher if the search query and your keyword is an exact match. But this does not say that by having exact match on all your keywords will get you a higher quality score for ad position. I think the point here is if you’re obsessing over match types in your ad groups and how they may or may not affect your quality score, obsess no more. Move on and worry about a different aspect of the quality score!

Misconception #2: You can buy a good quality score. Wrong! There are so many factors involved in how Google determines your quality score, and simply bidding higher isn’t one of them. At a high level the Google AdWords Quality Score is based on the relevance of your keywords, ads, landing pages to the users search term. The more relevant you are, the better your quality score. Don’t burn yourself by trying to bid higher on keywords just to see if it works. You’ll end up blowing your budget on a huge misconception!


Misconception #3: Quality score is affected if your ads are not running. This is also false. If you turn off or pause your account, then turn it back on at a later date, assuming you haven’t switched any of your keywords or ads around during that time, you’re quality score will not be affected. The quality score is typically affected when you separate your better performing keywords from their ad texts. So just by turning off your account won’t screw up anything with your overall quality score once you turn your account back on.

New Chart: What Search Marketers Don't Pay Attention to ... But Should

I found this extremely interesting:

As part of a June 2008 survey, www.marketingsherpa.com asked marketers an open-ended question about the most underused metrics in search. Then, put the varied answers into the categories above. Measuring conversion and ROI was a huge theme; more than half of the respondents to this question mentioned it in some form.

Methods for measuring conversion vary quite a bit depending on the circumstances of each marketer’s path to sale. Marketers with short, impulse-buy sales cycles were quite adamant that immediate sales should be tied to keywords when figuring out conversion.

On the other hand, marketers with longer sales cycles and less tangible conversion events pushed for more proxy metrics or KPIs (Key Performance Indicators) – such as time spent on the site, offline conversions, branding value, and lifetime value. Regardless of the path to purchase, all marketers are correct that valuing marketing vehicles by ROI is a goal that needs more attention.

Key takeaway:
With prices rising steadily, marketers who evaluate search against tangible KPIs will be the ones who will optimize and balance their spendi

Google's Privacy Policy Link: Too Little, Too Late?

makes you think...

Now that it's facing a genuine privacy crisis, Google has decided to quell a completely insignificant privacy dust-up. The search giant has finally placed a link to its privacy policy on the home page. Previously, users had to click on multiple links, or search on the terms "Google privacy policy," to reach the information.
This purely cosmetic change might placate some watchdogs, who argued that Google was violating California law by not including the link on its home page, but does nothing to solve the larger problem: Google stores too much information about its users.

Among other data, the company retains logs showing users' IP addresses and their search queries. Google contends that IP addresses don't usually reveal people's identities. But that assertion ignores the reality that examining all of a person's searches can in itself reveal identity. In other words, users' identities can be deduced whether the IP address is real or a made-up sequence of numbers -- as long as it's paired with all of the searches originating from a single computer.

Last week, a federal judge ordered Google to disclose to Viacom complete user logs for YouTube, including all users' IP addresses, screen names and which videos they watched. Google and Viacom have since tried to quell privacy concerns, with Google saying it will ask to "anonymize" IP addresses, even though that won't necessarily preserve users' privacy as long as all of their information is still paired with the same identifier. Viacom has also said it will handle all information confidentially.

As privacy advocates point out, Google wouldn't be facing this problem now if it hadn't compiled and stored these records in the first place.

Louis Stanton, the federal judge who issued the order in the YouTube lawsuit, wrote in his opinion that Google argues in its public policy blog that IP addresses aren't necessarily personally identifiable. "We have proposed broad global privacy standards, and are strong supporters of the idea that data protection laws should apply to any data that could identify you. The reality is though that in most cases, an IP address without additional information cannot," the blog states.

But, on other sections of its site, Google equates IP addresses with personally identifiable information. "Due to user privacy concerns, Google Analytics doesn't report on personally identifiable information, including a visitor's IP address," the company states on a site about Google's analytics tool.

In other words, even Google realizes that, for all practical purposes, IP addresses should be treated as personally identifiable information. Given the events of last week, the company should rethink the wisdom of retaining such data.

Microsoft offers iPods as search incentives

Microsoft is attempting to convince Australian users to use its Live search engine by offering products from industry competitor Apple as bait through a local venture with the Nine Network, Ninemsn. The Brisbane Times reveals that the software giant is offering the iPod nano, Shuffle, and Touch to users who perform searches through Ninemsn. Ninemsn head Alex Parsons said that it would have run the contest using the Zune, but the Microsoft-made player does not currently sell in Australia. "Where we don't have a great product or we don't have a product at all there's no internal edict that says we're not allowed to use competitor products," said Parsons.

Microsoft is approving the promotion in order to draw attention away from search and advertising competitor Google – the use of Google's services at Ninemsn is forbidden – by providing a very Google-like search interface, as well as improving search results, speed, and content. Google currently sees use from 9.7 million Australians, compared to Live at 3 million, and Yahoo at 1.4 million.

Overall, Ninemsn hopes that it will succeed in the long fight, since Google controls so much of the present marketplace.

Microsoft is currently spending a great deal of money to compete with Google in the US, with the purchase of Powerset, a company who developed "semantic web" search technology that recognizes both meaning and context of search terms.

Teens Learn From Advertising on Social Sites

I found these stats very interesting. They are American driven but it paints an interesting story.
The Teen Topix study conducted by OTX, investigated the complex lives of the 13 -17 year old set, found that teens are spending an average of 11.5 hours online, doing everything from instant messaging and visiting social networking sites to shopping and listening to music, but dispels myths that this group wants to do everything online.

The study did find that 24% of teens are spending more than 15 hours a week online and when all teens were asked how frequently they do typical online activities, instant messaging came up as the most frequent activity, followed by visiting social networking sites, email, searching, and visiting virtual community sites.

• 45% spent from 1 to less than 8 hours on line during a typical week
• 31% from 8 to less than 15
• 24% 15 hours and over
  

78% of teens are concerned about computer viruses while online, followed by:

• Identity theft (67%)
• Unauthorized access to personal information (65%)
• Scams (60%)
• Spam (60%)

The average teen has signed up for over four social networking sites and currently belongs to two, reports the study. Teens are receptive to advertising on these sites, where the majority of teens learn about:

• Financial services (63%)
• Movies in theaters (59%)
• Mobile services and accessories (58%)
• Travel (57%)
• Other websites (53%)

View http://blogs.mediapost.com/research_brief/?p=1730#comments