Google sent me $100 to start my first AdWord campaign yesterday afternoon for Connexius. I set up the campaign last week but suspended it to do some work on the landing page. The funny thing is the email came in shortly after I did a bunch of Google searches on Microsoft’s AdCenter. I wonder…..

Seriously, the $100 seed is a great marketing strategy and timing it to customers that hold off on releasing their initial campaign makes complete sense. Since AdCenter is almost a carbon copy of AdWord, I wonder if Microsoft will send me a $100 promo if I hold off for a week. If I can only figure out a way to scale these coupons 100 times, I will have my marketing budget for 2010!

-Chris Poer

I read a report from Experian Hitwise that Google’s market share in the search engine market is slipping at the expense of Bing. The numbers are:

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This got me thinking (I know, usually a bad sign). As a small startup with limited time and budget I decided to focus solely on Google from an SEO and advertising perspective. It was an easy decision as I am not a big Microsoft fan (coding websites for a buggy IE is a major headache, my XBOX360 died, their OSs seem to get worse with each release, and their treatment of partners is just wrong) and I do not know anybody that uses a search engine other than Google. However, I am not satisfied with the expected ROI for a Google AdWord and AdSense advertising campaign that I am building. This article got me thinking that ignoring Bing might be a mistake.

From an SEO perspective optimizing a site for Google pretty much takes care of the other search engines (see note below). A great article by Tom Costello shows that Bing doesn’t seem to use any new signals to evaluate website relevance. However, there are some differences in their algorithm that he noticed including:

• Bing gives stronger emphasis to keywords in URLs
• Bing seems to give more weight to capitalized terms
• Bing prefers pages from large sites

Other than to making large sites and capitalizing keywords there really is not much you can do different to make the first page of Bing’s search engine results.

It really is the potential to get a better ROI on advertising campaigns for Connexius and NorthCarolina.me that drew my attention to this study. The economics of Google’s Adword/Adsense auction process drives the cost to the point that the campaign becomes marginally profitable for commodity keywords. My thought was using a second tier search engine that is growing in popularity might make for a more profitable advertising campaign. So after spending a couple of hours playing with Bing’s AdCenter and analyzing the estimated bid prices for my keywords and the impact of important business case variables such as CTR, spam, and click fraud I came to the conclusion that it is impossible to make a judgment without running a few simultaneous campaigns. The data that is presented by AdWord and AdCenter just cannot be reliably compared. So I have decided to split my budget in half for the next couple of months and see which performs best on identical campaigns.

Stay tuned for the results.

- Chris Poer

Note 1:
Search engines use traditional signals like title, URL, emphasis/heading, document length and number of occurrences on page to generate an on-page score. They then make an off page score from a count of matching anchors, possibly weighted by the quality of the source page. They combine these scores with some proximity information, and some notion of page popularity (e.g. PageRank). Finally they demote spam and they promote pages that are clicked on for this query more than one would expect.