Advertising

Most Search Engines generate revenue from advertising, some search engines facilitate this advertising on 3rd party sites (we don’t display ads, but wordpress even has easy plugins for publishing these adverts). There’s some guidelines about what you can publish, etc.

The basic model, as I’m sure you are aware is that a Merchant asks a Search Engine to display an advert in some way when a certain phrase or word is searched for and then will pay on each click, or to contextually analyse the page surrounding the advert and deliver the Merchants advert into places where the contextualisation is correct. In this second model, the website displaying the advert gets a portion of the click revenue when an action is performed.

All this works terribly well, and barring some clickfraud skullduggery it’s a model which seems set to continue.

Micropayments

The more astute amongst you will have realised where this is going already.

Forever, Business has been working on a way of acquiring micropayments for web content. But have generally failed to come up with a pain free way of harvesting these from passing Audience who generally feel that web content should be free.

Obviously, Business is doing it the wrong way round, and there’s no alternative for them.

Tips Jar

Imagine, during your general trawling around the web, say from Digg or Fark or B3ta or wherever, you had a low impact mechanism to thank a publisher of some content you liked by dropping a few proper real world coins into their tip jar. All it would take would be about 3 mouse clicks.

Would you do it?

You go to a site, you see something that genuinely interested you written by a small time website owner desperate to make a few bucks here and there from his site.

Would you do it? Would you?

If you do, just make sure you visit a few pages wherever you end up.

This ad is designed to get families to change their lifestyles so that they can eat better, move more, live longer, blah blah blah. Anyway, at the end of the ad was an unusual call-to-action (I think Orange have used it in the past). I was instructed to ‘search for change4life’ (or google ‘change4life’ as most people will do).

Ok so I do that and get the following SERP:

Now as you know, people are a lot more ‘SERP savvy’ these days and trust organic listings more than sponsored listings. Hence why PPC and SEO must work together in the SERP’ so you would think that the Change4life site would have secured first place in the organic listings. WRONG! Even though there is an NHS article about the Change4life campaign in first position, the intended site that they want us to go to is in second position and we all know the importance of securing first position, oh dear. You may argue that they have some sort of coverage with the article in first position but you have to navigate way below the fold (after muchos content) for the actual link to the intended site.

Moving on. A lot of people will also search for the obvious variant ‘change for life’. I did this, and got the following:

Once again, PPC is all good but look, there’s no sign of any organic listings. WTF! Surely, getting some sort of organic exposure for an obvious search-term variant is vital? Granted, it doesn’t happen overnight but why not use another URL to promote? One that doesn’t have any obvious variants.

Does all this really matter? Well, I certainly have no reason to use this site so a no for me. However, this campaign is funded by taxpayer’s money so yes it does matter.

Is all our hard-earned taxpayer’s money going straight to Adwords? If so, what a flipping waste. If they sorted out their SEO and maybe invested in a decent URL, there wouldn’t be the need to invest in PPC. Instead, this money could be invested in something far more useful OR are people ignoring the sponsored ads, clicking on the first result in the organic listings and finding it’s irrelevant? If so, it seems as though we won’t eat better, move more and live longer after all.

Ok rant over and back to bed.

PPC-001

We’re playing as we go along with it, we’ve never used wordpress before and it has some limitations. Som of which we’ve fixed, some of which are being fixed, and some of which will never be fixed.

Mostly, this site is just a chassis. Imagine being asked the question

‘So have you ever seen a site which does …example… very well?’

and having to keep a catalogue of sites in your head, because not one site does everything perfectly – well.. we’re having a go, but none of us wanted to hand code a site from the ground up (we don’t have time) so slapping WordPress into some webspace became the obvious answer.

Some things we’re currently having some problems with include:

Over-riding auto generated meta descriptions
A nice 404 page
Recent searches

for example

Anyway, we’re getting through the list as best we can.

This post is a category pinch-point as well

Go to the Your SEO is shit hompage