Brides, Grads, and Dads

This is from Googles Blog - check it out on http://adwords.blogspot.com.

June is a month of weddings, graduations, and, of course, Father's Day (June 17th!). Jennie Cohen from the AdWords team is here to share how you can make the most out of this summer gift-giving:


Here come the brides: According to a 2006 Questus research study, 97% of brides now use the Internet to plan their weddings, and 93% find new ideas and brands online. Google's content network includes wedding planning sites like eWedding.com, which engaged couples visit frequently as their big day approaches. These sites offer a fantastic opportunity for caterers, photographers, DJs, formal wear retailers, and florists to market their products and services. But they're not the only ones who stand to benefit. Many couples are already anticipating post-nuptial purchases such as honeymoon travel, a new home, and household items like furniture and cooking supplies – especially if they find that their wedding gifts include more cash than kitchen appliances.

* Make sure your keywords are targeting wedding guests rather than brides- and grooms-to-be. Use keywords like 'wedding day gift ideas' and 'unique wedding gifts' to reach undecided shoppers. Include these terms in your ad text and experiment with calls to action like 'Find the Perfect Wedding Gift' and 'Save on Gifts for Newlyweds.'

* Try creating a separate landing page on your website that features all your wedding-appropriate products. That way, wedding attendees will have an easier time finding the perfect gifts and adding them to their shopping carts.

* Don't forget that wedding party members are often looking for finery of their own!

School's out
Young adults are notoriously hard to shop for. According to the National Retail Federation's Graduation Survey, 31% of proud parents and other shoppers plan to give gift cards for graduation. The survey also found that the average graduation gift shopper plans to give gifts to two graduates this year, spending about $50 on each. In light of these two findings, consider the following tips:

* If you offer gift cards on your website, try mentioning them in your ad text.

* If you offer any special discounts like 'buy one, get one half off' or 'free shipping on orders over $50,' you can use your ad text to let potential customers know. These will attract shoppers looking for gifts for more than one graduate.

World's Greatest Dad
Designated as a holiday a full 51 years after Mother's Day, Father's Day has always lagged behind its more prominent counterpart. In recent years, however, it seems to be catching up. According to a survey done by the National Retail Federation in 2007, U.S. consumers will spend nearly $10 billion on dads this year, with the average person spending $98.34 (up from $88.80 in 2006) on dear old dad. Roughly 19% of respondents plan to buy Father's Day gifts online., and with a little work, you can use AdWords to connect with these gift-givers.

* Set up a separate AdWords campaign for all Father's Day-related keywords and ads to gain better control over your daily budget and maximum cost-per-click. You can then delete this campaign after June 17 or pause it and use it again next year.

* Within your Father's Day campaign, create distinct ad groups for each product category, and direct visitors who click on your ads to the most relevant pages on your website.

* The fewer clicks it takes to find the perfect gift and complete the transaction, the more likely it is that consumers will complete a purchase. You may want to consider using Google Checkout, a convenient checkout process that can save your customers time, while saving you money.


We hope you'll use Google AdWords to reach out to gift-givers this month, helping them share the joy with the brides, dads, and grads in their lives.

The URL Is Dead, Long Live Search

Wow - i found this very interesting!


Last week I was watching TV and saw something that really caught my eye. It was a commercial for Special K, the breakfast cereal from Kellogg, and rather than end with a plug for the product's web site -- SpecialK.com -- it advised people to search Yahoo! for "Special K" instead. I started to wonder two things: 1. is Yahoo! paying Special K for tack-on advertising? and 2. has searching really become so natural that it is more effective to tell people to search for your site than it is to tell them to visit directly?

To the latter question, the answer appears to be a somewhat surprising "yes." Of the 10 fastest rising search terms on Google last year, 7 were for searches where adding a ".com" would have brought the user to the correct site. These are called "navigational" searches -- searches done when the user already knows exactly where he or she wants to end up -- and they make up a surprising large number of total searches.











According to Compete last fall, navigational searches make up about 17% of all searches on average, more on Yahoo! and Live than on Google. For well-known web sites, Compete found that about 9 out of the top 10 search terms for that site tend to be some sort of variation on the domain. Surprisingly, people actually often search for entire domain names rather than type them into their browser's address bar.

After a little digging, I found that Kellogg's Yahoo! campaign actually began last December with their holiday TV commercial run. Hitwise reported that that holiday campaign boosted traffic to SpecialK.com and that almost two thirds of that traffic came from searches for "Special K." Consumers were following the advice of the ad, as well, with search traffic to the domain skewing 53% toward Yahoo!


While I couldn't find out which way the money was flowing, Stephan Pechdimaldji of Yahoo!'s advertising PR team told me that the Special K search campaign had a 10 times better response rate than previous campaigns the company had run on Yahoo! It's hard to say if that indicates that a call to action to search trumps a call to visit a site directly, or if only that TV ads are big traffic drivers.

Either way, search over URL seems to be a trend we're likely to see more of. Advertising search boxes rather than .com names is already all the rage in Japan. Mac developer Cabel Sasser pointed out in March that search boxes with suggested terms are pretty much all you see on ads in Japan, but he wondered if search marketers and spammers might ruin that strategy in the US. That's probably why Kellogg bought the top sponsored result for "Special K" on Yahoo! (and, for good measure, on Google as well).

Now in Play: AOL, Facebook and Many Others

Yahoo’s stock price may be falling like a rock, but the value of dozens of other Web companies—private ones like Facebook and divisions of public companies like Time Warner’s AOL—is surging.

Now that Microsoft and Yahoo have stormed away from each other, the pressure is on for them to show that they can thrive on their own. And the best way to create some fast excitement is through acquisitions.

Wringing long-term value out of tech companies is harder, but it can be done. Hotmail helped bolster Microsoft’s MSN. And the combination of Overture and Inktomi created a plausible search unit inside Yahoo where there was none before. That said, Hotmail didn’t really enable Microsoft to best Yahoo in Web portals. And Yahoo wouldn’t be in this mess if it were able to become more of a real player in search.

We’re at the end of a multi-year boom in Internet startups, with the economy and the advertising market that is tied to it looking increasingly dicey. So a lot of companies would be very open to selling now, especially if Microsoft seems willing to pay the huge premiums it has paid in other deals.

There are really three markets up for grabs: Search ads, display ads and Internet audience.

Let’s take these one by one.

Search ads. There was only one possible deal here: a combination of Yahoo and Microsoft. There are no other viable competitors to Google, which already controls about two-thirds of the market and would gain even more influence through its proposed partnership with Yahoo. It’s an open question whether Microsoft or Yahoo will ever be anything other than bit players in search ads, but if they do find a way, it won’t be because of acquisitions.

Display ads. There has already been a lot of consolidation in this space already. Most of the good independent companies have been bought by Yahoo, Microsoft or AOL. There are a few independent companies, like ValueClick, which may well be expensive for what it is. And there are still some private companies like Revenue Science, a behavioral targeting firm, and a bunch of mid-sized advertising networks of questionable quality.

AOL, then, is the big prize. Its Advertising.com unit leads its part of the market. Yahoo is known to be in talks to buy AOL, offering roughly 20 percent of its shares to Time Warner in exchange. Microsoft would be foolish not to consider buying AOL as well, although that deal would probably need to be for cash rather than stock, depriving Time Warner of a large exposure to the Internet business.

A buyer of AOL would have to decide whether taking on the rest of the company would be worth getting the advertising business and other choice assets, like the instant-message system. AOL is growing some of its Web sites, but there are a lot of tired corners of its business.

The bigger question to my mind is how much opportunity there is for a company to build out a display ad network if it doesn’t have a search ad network. Right now, advertisers and publishers handle display and search ad as separate categories. Google’s incursions into display ads have not knocked Advertising.com from its leading position. Still, Google has a good hand here, given its DoubleClick acquisition, the growing video ad profile of YouTube and the vast reach of its text ad network.

Internet Audience. By this, I mean pretty much any Web site that will attract users, and thus can carry ads. This is an overbroad category—encompassing everything from Web search and e-mail to social networks and celebrity gossip. But all the big Web companies are in fact overbroad in their ambitions, and they could well buy companies with sites in any of these areas.

For anyone thinking big, Facebook is the free radical on the Internet now. It is a venture-backed company on track for a public offering. Unlike AOL, which is older than many Facebook users, Facebook is growing, with an enthusiastic staff and a fresh brand. But these things don’t come cheap. Microsoft already bought a small stake in Facebook in a deal that valued the company at $15 billion.

You could imagine a few other big deals: An arrangement for some sort of joint venture or stock swap with News Corporation to merge MySpace into either Yahoo or MSN, for example. IAC/InterActive has Ask.com and a few other properties that might be of interest.

And then there are myriad smaller companies that have been formed and lived their lives on the assumption they will eventually be auctioned off to one of the Internet giants.

It is a precarious time for Yahoo and Microsoft. There may well be good deals to be done amid all the uncertainty in the market. But for every Hotmail and Flickr—acquisitions that worked well for Microsoft and Yahoo, respectively—there are duds like Yupi and Broadcast.com.

How Microsoft abandoned its bid for Yahoo!

Well it never eventuated but i have a feeling that this isn't the last we will hear of the Microhoo saga... as this article rightly suggests, the shareholders will start to ask questions...


Microsoft has abandoned its blockbuster bid to acquire the internet giant Yahoo! after a fresh takeover offer of almost $US50 billion ($53.4 billion) was subsequently rejected by its target as still too low.

The about-face followed a meeting in Seattle on Saturday morning between Microsoft's chief executive, Steve Ballmer, and the chief and co-founder of Yahoo!, Jerry Yang, said a person familiar with the discussions. The Seattle meeting was also attended by Yahoo!'s other founder, David Filo, and the Microsoft president Kevin Johnson.

Ballmer increased Microsoft's offer to $US33 a share, or a total of $US47.5 billion, from its initial bid of $29.40 a share. Mr Yang said Yahoo! would not accept an offer below $37 a share.

"Despite our best efforts, including raising our bid by roughly $5 billion, Yahoo! has not moved toward accepting our offer," Mr Ballmer said. "After careful consideration, we believe the economics demanded by Yahoo! do not make sense for us, and it is in the best interests of Microsoft stockholders, employees and other stakeholders to withdraw our proposal."

A person close to Yahoo! said price was not the only stumbling block. Yahoo! was also concerned the deal could be blocked by regulators, and wanted a higher offer, in part as a hedge against that risk.

Microsoft's decision to walk away casts a cloud of uncertainty over Yahoo! and its shareholders. The breakdown in the talks is likely to send Yahoo!'s shares plunging, and Mr Yang and his team will have to decide how to placate investors.

The company has been exploring alternatives to a marriage with Microsoft, including a partnership in search advertising with its rival Google, which could lift Yahoo!'s profit and perhaps its stock price.

Yahoo! has also discussed a possible merger with the AOL unit of Time Warner and the MySpace unit of News Corp.

But both options pose challenges. A Google partnership is likely to attract scrutiny from regulators because of its dominance over online search and advertising, while AOL and Yahoo! have many overlapping businesses and technologies.

In a statement issued late on Saturday, Mr Yang said: "With the distraction of Microsoft's unsolicited proposal now behind us, we will be able to focus all of our energies on executing the most important transition in our history."

Reactions at Yahoo! are likely to be mixed. Several senior executives had favoured selling to Microsoft and had said in recent days that they hoped for a deal. Yet other executives were high-fiving each other for successfully defeating Microsoft's bid, people close to the company said.

While its stock may fall in trading today, Yahoo!'s management was encouraged by discussions with its largest investors, who had urged management not to accept $US33 a share, the sources said. Microsoft's withdrawal was considered a personal victory for Mr Yang, one person who spoke to him said.

For its part, Microsoft said it would continue efforts to build an online business on its own.

"We have a talented team in place and a compelling plan to grow our business through innovative new services and strategic transactions with other business partners," Mr Ballmer said. "While Yahoo! would have accelerated our strategy, I am confident that we can continue to move forward toward our goals."

Microsoft has spent years and billions of dollars trying to build an online business. Yet it has steadily lost ground to Google in the search business and failed to gain significant momentum with advertisers.

Microsoft's decision to abandon its pursuit of Yahoo! is not necessarily the last chapter in the three-month saga. If Yahoo!'s shares fall significantly, the company will be under pressure to act, and may choose to resume negotiations.

Earlier this year, under intense shareholder pressure, BEA Systems did just that after Oracle dropped an unsolicited offer it had made.

"This seems like a very strong but serious negotiating tactic," said Jonathan Miller, the former chairman and chief executive of AOL. "It will be up to Yahoo! to come back to the negotiating table."

In a letter to Mr Yang sent on Saturday afternoon, Mr Ballmer wrote: "It is clear to me that it is not sensible for Microsoft to take our offer directly to your shareholders. This approach would necessarily involve a protracted proxy contest."

He added: "Our discussions with you have led us to conclude that, in the interim, you would take steps that would make Yahoo! undesirable as an acquisition for Microsoft."

He took particular aim at Yahoo!'s discussions of a partnership with Google, noting that it would "make an acquisition of Yahoo! undesirable to us for a number of reasons".

Microsoft's decision to abandon its bid is likely to raise questions among investors about the judgment of both Microsoft and Yahoo!.

When Microsoft made its initial bid, valued at $US44.6 billion, it said Yahoo! was an important part of its strategy to take on Google. Its decision to withdraw, after threatening to force a shareholder vote, may prompt its shareholders to doubt its resolve. At the same time, many Microsoft shareholders who did not want to bid for Yahoo! may be relieved and send shares of Microsoft higher.

For Yahoo!'s shareholders, the abandoned deal may create even more uncertainty about the company's management. Many would have preferred it to have accepted the offer of $US47.5 billion.

The biggest beneficiary of Microsoft's decision may be Google. A combined Microsoft and Yahoo! would have created a mighty adversary offering a vast array of online services to hundreds of millions of people around the world. It would have had a dominant position in banners and other graphical ads, a business in which Google has struggled to make inroads.

People involved in the negotiations from the start said Microsoft and Yahoo! had talked only infrequently over the past three months. The two companies held only two informal meetings in February, after the initial offer on January 31.

At one meeting Mr Ballmer asked Mr Yang what price he would have to pay to reach a deal. Mr Yang responded by saying, "There is no one here authorised to negotiate price."

Frustrated by the lack of discussions, Microsoft sent a threatening letter to Yahoo! on April 5 suggesting that Microsoft would try to force a shareholder vote to circumvent Yahoo!'s management if they could not reach an agreement within three weeks. At the same time, Microsoft began seeking a partner for its bid, holding talks with News Corp and AOL.

Both of those companies had been holding concurrent negotiations with Yahoo! about partnerships.

On April 15 Microsoft and Yahoo! held a secret meeting in Portland, Oregon, where they discussed "social issues" - such as who would run the Yahoo! unit if it were folded into Microsoft - but no decisions were made.

Three days later bankers for Microsoft and Yahoo! held a conference call in which Yahoo!'s bankers suggested that $US40 a share would get the deal done.

A week later Microsoft's deadline passed without it proceeding with a proxy contest, as it had threatened; Microsoft had decided it would carry on seeking a friendly deal, and that a hostile bid could impair Yahoo!'s value.

On April 29 Mr Ballmer and Mr Yang had several telephone conversations as Yahoo! sought to reach a deal to keep Microsoft from turning hostile. In those talks Mr Yang overruled his bankers, telling Mr Ballmer that Microsoft did not have to go as high as $US40 a share to seal a deal, and suggested they begin negotiations.

The next day Microsoft and Yahoo! began talks, pulling in dozens of bankers and lawyers to try to reach a deal. Mr Ballmer flew to Yahoo!'s headquarters in Sunnyvale, California, where Mr Yang said Yahoo! would be willing to accept nothing lower than $US38 a share.