Late last year the FTC fined Adteractive over $600,000 for deceptive advertising practices. At issue were advertisements for FreeGiftWorld.com that promised free Ipods and other hot products, but in reality required consumers to fill out offers from advertisers (many of which required paying money) before getting the product.

Long before the FTC settlement, Google aggressively purged such ads (known as “incentivized offers”) from the ranks of the AdWords search results. Adteractive, for example, went from spending hundreds of thousands of dollars a month on incentivized ads on Google to next to nothing. I know this first hand, as I was managing this spend at the time. If you read Google’s AdWords blog postings about Quality Score, the very first sites they list as having bad quality score are “Data collection sites that offer free gifts, subscription services etc., in order to collect private information.”

Wrong! After optimizing pay-per-click campaigns for the past seven years I now fully believe that visitors clicking from a paid search ad simply don’t read. Further, I question their skimming and scanning comprehension. I theorize that paid search visitors emotionally motivated by relevant ad copy plow into a landing page with tunnel-vision seeking only to take the offer.

I recently read in the November/December 2007 issue of Revenue Magazine (pg. 32) that “Hitwise announced that Google accounted for 63.98 percent of all U.S. searches in the four weeks ending September 1, 2007.” Yahoo Search was second with 22.87%, MSN with 7.98% and Ask.com fourth with 3.49%. The Hitwise report was taken from a sample size of 10 million U.S. Internet users.

For the past two years, I’ve put forth predictions for the SEM industry. You can judge the accuracy of the 2006 and 2007 predictions for yourself and determine whether it’s worth reading my 2008 SEM predictions. If you like them, I’ll take all the credit. If not, blame the rest of the Anvil Media team, as it was all their ideas. Enjoy.

Congratulations to the winners of our Search Marketing Standard Crossword Challenge! They have fearlessly completed the crossword in the Winter 07/08 issue and sent us the correct keyphrase. Without further ado, I present to you the official* People of Wisdom (in alphabetical order):

It seems that only yesterday, we have begun work on our first-ever issue of Search Marketing Standard. In reality, it was December of 2005 - exactly two years ago.

Back then, we started off with just 32 pages and a handful of contributors and sponsors. Fast forward two years later and we have reached over 50,000 readers, 60 meaty pages of content, and over a dozen terrific contributors in each issue.

So, on behalf of the entire staff at Search Marketing Standard, thank you - our dear readers and supporters - for making it happen! We are proud to be THE publication for our industry.

Also, in the spirit of the holidays, we will be donating $1 for every new subscriber that have signed up with us over the last 3 weeks to Toys for Tots, the annual holiday drive to provide toys for needy children.

Boris Mordkovich
- Publisher

Although US search market is by far the biggest one, new and important markets are popping out all over the world. Probably as a reflection of our own staff, this magazine has been working hard to publish as much information about overseas markets as we can. In the Fall 2007 issue, we had dedicated the whole cover story to international markets and have been publishing a permanent column on international search ever since.

One of the important emerging markets is Russia. By the end of 2007, Russia should have 30 million internet users and with oil economy booming, the middle class is growing fast. In 2006, Russian businesses spent about $100 million on SEO, around $210 million on PPC and other online advertising and up to $60 million on links. Unlike the rest of Europe, Russian search market is not dominated by Google. By the number of searches, Google is a distant second and on PPC spending, it is in the third place.

What feels like an eternity ago, I wrote an article titled, “Are Your Internet Goals Leaning Against the Right Wall” that told a story about a website company’s miserable experience with a well-known third party PPC management company. The point of the story asked if businesses were setting the right performance objectives for their online advertising campaigns. From my experiences, it seems most agencies and businesses alike tend to focus on impressions and click-through rates versus conversions and cost per actions.

Fast-forward a few years and wouldn’t you imagine…

During the Q&A section of the panel I participated in this week at PubCon, we got a lot of questions about bid management software. In particular, it seems that everyone in the audience acknowledged the need for it, but no one knew which company to select, nor how to select a bid management software.

So without further ado, my ten tips for choosing bid management software:

The following is a transcript of a recent conversation between Google and me:

David: I just want to say one word to you - just one word.
Google: Yes sir.
David: Are you listening?
Google: Yes I am.
David: ‘Plastic.’
Google: Exactly how do you mean?
David: There’s a great future in plastic. Think about it. Will you think about it?
Google: Yes I will.
David: Shh! Enough said. That’s a deal.