Posts Tagged ‘Yahoo search’

Posted on June 14, 2011 by Hans Riemer

Personal Search Results

Last week, someone emailed me a link to a YouTube video that was recorded at a TED conference. In it, Eli Pariser makes a presentation about “Filter Bubbles” in which he demonstrates how our online behavior causes information providers to “filter” what we’re shown, with the result that we tend to see and hear only what they perceive we want to see and hear. He presents a compelling case and it’s worth the investment of nine minutes to watch. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B8ofWFx525s

Eli, you may recall, is the former executive director of MoveOn.org, which means that I probably don’t share most of his political views, though I do understand his concern about the rapid growth of personalized news search results. However, I’m not so worried about personalized advertising and search results.

Recently, Time Magazine started showing up in my mailbox each week, which was puzzling because I knew I hadn’t subscribed. Then came Rolling Stone. Nobody has claimed credit, although I’ve made some discreet inquiries to several acquaintances and friends to try to identify my anonymous benefactor.

My hypothesis is that someone who knows me is trying to burst a self-imposed Filter Bubble,

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Posted on December 16, 2010 by Hans Riemer

Are you trapped?

Recently we were called in to investigate a PPC account that had been migrated from Yahoo

Search Marketing to Microsoft adCenter. Since moving to adCenter, the account experienced a significant drop in ROI. They were still getting plenty of clicks but those clicks weren’t converting, which was badly hammering their cost-per-acquisition.

The company sells Christmas decorations from their website. They have an excellent web analytics tool that can track individual incoming visitors (which Google Analytics does not do) so it didn’t take us long to spot quite a number of paid clicks that spent almost no time on the site. We looked at the referring URLs to see where the ads were appearing that sent these visitors and discovered something very interesting about Microsoft adCenter PPC that’s potentially costing advertisers some real money.

In a moment, we’re going to explain what is occurring and tell you how to fix it if it is happening to you. This affects advertisers using adCenter as well as those who previously used Yahoo Search Marketing, because YSM is now managed through adCenter.

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