On Feb 18, 2010, US & EU regulators approved the search alliance between Yahoo & Microsoft. This search alliance opens the door to new opportunities for advertisers. As per the Yahoo Search Marketing Blog; Yahoo & Microsoft are planning to complete the transition in US before the 2010 holiday season.

As we all are aware of the fact that, after the transition advertisers will have to use Microsoft adCenter to manage their online campaigns.

Here are few things which advertisers need to ensure for a smooth transition:

• Ad Titles & Description: Yahoo currently allows 40 characters in ad title, whereas Microsoft adCenter allows only 25 characters. Also, Yahoo allows ad description to be of 71 characters, while Microsoft adCenter allows only 70 characters. It is advisable to shorten the ad title & ad description to meet the Microsoft adCenter guidelines for a smooth transition.

• Keyword Changes: Microsoft adCenter treats singular/plural variation of keywords as individual keywords, whereas Yahoo does this job automatically. For a smooth transition, start expanding your keyword list to include all possible variations of the keywords (singular/plural & misspellings)

• Bid Changes: The minimum bids for a keyword to stay active in Yahoo are $0.01, while in Microsoft adCenter the minimum bid is $0.05. Once the transition is complete all the minimum bids will increase to $0.05.

For a detailed list of FAQ’s, please visit the Yahoo! Transition Center.

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Google officially announced in April, the importance of site speed i.e. page load time in Google’s ranking. Site Speed is how quickly a website responds to web requests. In late November Matt Cutts said, “Google’s co-founders want searching to be real fast, as if you are flipping through a magazine. Part of this, is making sure faster web pages rank better than slower ones.” So the page load time plays an important role to make searching faster.

This announcement adds a positive approach to the field of SEO, which always tries to deliver improvement in site quality and usability. While speed of the page is a part of site’s quality which indicates how important Site Speed is from SEO perspective. Google perpetually provides its webmasters with variety of tools which help in optimizing their sites and in the end improving the rankings and conversions.

Last year, in November, Google launched an open source tool named Google Closure which helps developers build rich JavaScript-intensive applications, which are both efficient and powerful. Many advanced portals and websites might have complex and heavy JavaScript codes and files that take a long time to load. Also it is not possible each time to include script files separately. Eventually the necessity and scope for page speed optimization has expanded with changes in Google’s database indexing structure and launch of Google Closure Tools.

The Closure Tool includes the following:

Closure Compiler – A JavaScript Optimizer

Closure Compiler is a package that compiles JavaScript into compact, high-performance code. This JavaScript optimizer compresses the file sizes by removing dead code, spaces and other comments and rewrites it.

You can either:

1. Use online Closure Compiler tool
2. Download Closure Tool

Closure Library – A comprehensive JavaScript Library

It is a well tested, cross browser JavaScript library which helps developers to extract what they want from a whole range of controls, data structures, widgets and more.

Closure Templates – An Easy templating system for both Java & JavaScript

These templates are implemented for both Java and JavaScript, so they can be called from clients or servers.

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The use of social media in advertising and marketing communications is growing. There are many reasons for why companies leverage these smart new–age Web 2.0 technologies.

Today, companies are utilizing Twitter, social blogs, social news sites, and others, to sense the “buzz” around their brand, company, products and services. This can provide companies insights that go well beyond their PR and reputation management efforts. It also provides companies an opportunity to be proactive and make strategic marketing decisions. For instance:

• Understanding the market landscape. Track industry trends by understanding how customers and different audiences talk about your company versus your competition. This is a good way to identify the market landscape within which your company functions.

• Understand general consumer sentiments. Get insights about consumer likes, dislikes and pain points around your company and its product/services. Arrive at goal-oriented marketing and communication strategies and allocate marketing budgets appropriately. A full-scale customer survey may not always be required.

• Identify and segment audiences. A critical assessment of who is saying what about your company/product(s), and where, is a good way to segment target audience types and identify potential audience groups. It is an insightful way to arrive at psychographic information about your audience. At a minimum, you can sense their web consumption and interests (news, social networking, blogging, etc.). It is also provides insights about which web forums and sites can be leveraged in order to effectively reach audiences.

• Up your R&D efforts. Develop new products by understanding what customers would consider valuable service/product extensions.

In a nutshell, there are numerous ways in which social media can complement marketing efforts, that too at a relatively low cost, especially today, where time and budgets have never been of greater essence. Social media, although still relatively new, is being utilized frequently and rather creatively by marketers and advertisers for a variety of reasons.

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Internet penetration is growing in all aspects in India. Be it better internet connections, active user base, time spent online, growing confidence of marketers towards the internet and the money pouring into this medium in terms of investments and advertising. Internet is changing the way businesses operate in India, primarily due to the very ability of this medium to do an end-to-end tracking.

One of the most established and dominating industries, the BFSI (Banking, Financial Services and Insurance) industry has started taking the internet medium more seriously than ever before. With penetration of Internet Banking, Plastic Money (Debit and Credit Cards) moving into every pocket, increase in financial information searches online, BFSI Industry is connecting more aggressively with the power internet users carry with them online.

Three most lucrative product-lines in BFSI i.e. Loans, Insurance and Investments are exploring to move towards completing their transactions on the internet. The option of buying investment products is actively available online; almost every General Insurance company has started selling their consumer side insurance policies online. Bajaj Finserv Lending (earlier Bajaj Finance) is the first loan provider to start issuing consumer durable loan approvals online. Max Bupa Health Insurance is not just present on every health-related search term on Google, on high traffic websites and in your mail box, but also very active on social platforms like Facebook & Twitter.

When we talk about insurance, traditionally we are always influenced by our next door agent to guide us in selecting which insurance policy to buy. Now there are various platforms online like InsurancePandit.com, ApnaPaisa.com and PolicyBazaar.com, allowing you to find the best insurance product that suits your needs and also buy them online. These platforms are estimated to influence more than a million users every month in taking informed decisions when it comes to buying an insurance product.

Almost every BSFI player started off their online marketing journey with search engines, but now, their presence is everywhere online. Their presence can be seen in not just in search and high traffic portals, but also on platforms like Youtube, Twitter and Facebook. One of the best advantages of the internet is that you can measure the performance of every action online and the BFSI sector is taking maximum advantage of this. They now exactly know about spends and impact of every impression they get online by using various online tracking tools.

The growing influence of the internet in buying decisions has impacted the budget allocation towards online marketing. As per one of the reports published by IAMAI, internet display advertising spends were estimated to be around INR 4.3 billion in 2009-10 with the BFSI contributing around 15 percent. Google estimates internet advertising spends to touch nearly INR 11 billion in 2010-11.

It all started with generating inquiries online and is now becoming a direct medium of sales. Surely, with increasing online collections, BFSI industry’s share of internet advertising spends will be on the rise day by day.

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Back in November 2009, Google had launched Ad Site Links to help advertisers get improved results from their top performing ads. According to Google, advertisers have experienced huge gains when Site links was introduced to some accounts as beta, and it helped increase the click through rate on an average by 30% or more.

Google has now enabled the option to set up Ad Site links for any campaign in your account. Earlier advertisers were needed to be eligible for adding site links in their account.

Example of Site Link:

If a user’s search query matches the keyword in a Site links enabled campaign, Google will determine if your ad is eligible to be shown. Below is the screen shot of Site Link Ad.

Note: An Ad Site links option is in the Campaign Settings tab. It appears as “Show additional links to my site” which is under the “Ad extensions” section. Refer to the screen shot below.

You should keep in mind that Ad Site links can be done on a campaign level only. The ad site link extension created should be relevant to all the ads present in that campaign.

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