I have this Google cheat sheet on my wall at work. It has everything from Google Pagerank, Google Formulas, Google Form Elements, Google Services, Query Structure and pretty much anything else Google. I appreciate the Google Advanced Search Operators. It’s a free download and its very handy.

Download the Google Cheat Sheet here.

Adweek published a story today entitled “Out-of-Context Ads Prove Effective” In this article it says:

“Yahoo! and MediaVest recently studied a group of consumers passionate about a particular subject area. Product ads displayed out of context had roughly the same impact on brand preference as identical placements shown next to related content.“

then it’s followed up with this:

“Yahoo! asked self-identified food lovers to rate various brands, including the single-serve gourmet coffee product Tassimo. Brand affinity increased 26 percent among those shown the ad on a Yahoo! Food page, and 21 percent among those shown the same ad on a Yahoo! News page.“

Your kidding me right? Based on this study I know there are going to be people who totally adjust their thinking on contextual ads. You mean to tell me because a group of people told Yahoo! that they liked food and because “brand affinity” increased 21% among those individuals on a News page; that contextual advertising aligned with similar content isn’t the most effective?

Now there’s plenty of cases where contextual ads when placed with content that is simliar is totally inaffective but there’s no way I believe that out of context ads are nearly as effective. In all my experiences thus far CTR as well as the quality of visitors have been higher when matching ads with related content.

I also want to add that behavior targetting is something I find very intriging and I know that Yahoo is dabling in this as well. But from what I saw with this story, this isn’t behavior targetting this was just a simple case of ads being displayed out of context.

Yesterday I received an email about a contest that the NAA (Newspaper Association of America) is having. Their wanting teens to make a video on youtube of what they like about the newspaper whether it be print or online and for doing this they have a chance to win an iPhone.

I think doing viral video is great I especially like what Google did recently with their Gmail Collaborative Video. Before I give my 2 cents on this watch the video below from the NAA. Read more »

Wordpress 2.3 has just been released and already there’s a lot of buzz about it. A little bit ago I got an IM from an old workmate to an article on Slashdot about privacy issues in the new version. After reading the article and looking at the thread on Google Groups it doesn’t seem like its that big of a deal. According to Matt Mullenweg who is a developer for them, Wordpress is only asking for 2 new things, your PHP version and a list of plugins. With this being said there will be a plugin to disable the transmission of data that he listed and gave these two urls:

http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/disable-wordpress-core-update/
http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/disable-wordpress-plugin-updates/

Matt also recommends:

“I would also recommend disabling the updates in Mac OS X, Firefox,
Windows, Thunderbird, Adobe Photoshop, and any other third-party
applications you have. As all of those are tied to your personal IP and
not your server IP they have far more implications for privacy.”

It’s still early and I may be misinformed but is this really that big of a deal? I mean Google’s system reads your email in order to send targeted Adsense ads to Gmail and now there’s a phone company that’s going to monitor calls in order to trigger targetted ads. (OMG!) My privacy is important to me but sharing what plugin’s I use isn’t a big deal, especially if its giving back to the developers to make an already awesome application that much better.

With that being said I probably won’t be switching to the new version anytime soon mainly because I don’t see the need. Whenever something is released early there are going to be bugs, plus I’d like to see where the privacy concerns with the latest version lead. I’m sure we’ll hear much more about this as the word spreads…..

Last week I saw a post on Search Engine Roundtable about users being frustrated over moving their Google accounts into Yahoo. I can totally understand their frustrations and I’ve had this happen as well. I’m going to to a quick walk-through below to show you how to successfully import your Google PPC campaign into Yahoo Search Marketing.

1. If you don’t already have the Google Adwords editor you need to download that under the tools section of Google adwords.
2. Next you need to open the Google Adwords editor and if this is your first time using it you need to import your accounts. Once this is done select which campaign you would like to move into Yahoo.
   
3. Once you’ve done this you need to do some editing to the excel file. The most important thing is to make sure you remove your negative keywords. Yahoo cannot accept negative keywords. You also want to look at your naming conventions and your tracking codes. I for example use GAW for Google and YSM for Yahoo. Hit save and hit ok after the warning about the unicode text format.
4. Once this is done go to Yahoo and then to import campaign. At this time you don’t want to import but you need to convert first. When it’s done converting download the file and open to inspect what changes you need to make. (Take a look at advanced match, standard match etc.) Then once you’ve made these changes make sure you save as a csv unicode txt. Your file must end in .csv
   
   
5. Now go to the import campaign option. Give it a name and upload.
6. Once the file is uploaded in Yahoo take a look at it. Make sure you set your negatives again The maximum amount of negatives is only 50 unlike Google so you need to set your negatives at the ad level as well if you have a large amount of negatives.
7. Now take a look at your daily budgets and take a look at your Geo-targeting and look at your content-match status too.

This is it. If I’ve left anything out please let me know. I am writing this kinda late