The AdGooroo Blog
December 13, 2011New Support Option
Posted by Kurt on December 13, 2011 to
We've started a community powered support forum at http://getsatisfaction.com/adogoroo. You can ask us questions, leave feedback and request new features for all AdGooroo products. We are actively monitoring our new forum and are looking forward to your questions and feedback. Join us!
CPG and Paid Search: Finally?
Posted by Richard Stokes on November 17, 2011 to CPG, Research
CPG has historically been a slow category for paid search, but it looks as if perhaps that is about to change. We noted a 40% increase in monthly paid search spend in the 51 CPG brands we follow:
And who's getting the most attention? If you read last year's CPG report we conducted with Experian, then it won't be a surprise to hear BettyCrocker.com is still on top. Since then, however, KraftRecipes.com has pulled ahead of the pack. Honorable mentions go out to Red Bull and Campbell's.
For more data, reach out to our sales team to learn about our research offerings and services.
Things are getting very scary at AdGooroo…
Posted by Jim on October 31, 2011 to
AdGooroo celebrated Halloween in style today with a hotly contested costume competition. Top prize went to Charlie Sheen’s Girlfriend, followed by Big Ballerina and Hot Dog and Shaggy Dog, who tied for third place. Thanks to everyone who participated!
New PPC Holiday Report: Maximize Paid Search & Beat the Competition during the Holiday Retail Season
Posted by Jim on October 25, 2011 to
AdGooroo's latest report offers a broad range of invaluable information to help search marketers maximize their paid search program this Holiday season and overcome both current economic challenges and their top PPC competitors:
- Understand recent consumer, advertiser and online retail trends that may affect your Holiday search campaigns
- View all of your competitors’ Holiday ad copy in near real time
- Monitor shifts in competitors’ PPC tactics and strategy as they occur—see when Black Friday promotions begin, which incentives and products they’re promoting, etc.
- Identify your top search competitors by ad spend and coverage and generate highly accurate estimates of their PPC budgets
- Maximize your paid and organic keyword visibility via a simple gap analysis
Additional Google China Support
Posted by Mike Schiro on October 19, 2011 to Features, Targets
We are excited to announce a new feature that is now available for all of our clients and should be of particular interest to those currently monitoring Google China.
AdGooroo's SEM Insight product is now capable of monitoring Google China using multiple languages. Modern Chinese typically involves two forms of writing, Traditional (TW) or Simplified (CN). Mainland China tends to favor the Simplified form (though there is a trend towards returning to Traditional) while areas like Taiwan and Hong Kong favor Traditional. In order to insure we are collecting the most accurate data possible we have rolled out support for both languages for Google China.
Users can now select which version of Google China (or both!) they would like to monitor. The new target is available NOW in the SEM Insight Setup Wizard, which can be found in the Manage Groups report, and can be used in any new or existing keyword group.
AdGooroo-Hitwise Agency Breakfast a Success
Posted by Jim on October 5, 2011 to
Yesterday morning AdGooroo and Experian Hitwise hosted an informative breakfast event for Chicago agencies at the Trump International Tower & Hotel.
Titled “Wrap It Up: Increasing Your Clients' Online ROI”, the event provided a 360 degree view of the search marketing efforts of two leading jewelry retailers during Holiday 2010—from consumer behavior and demographics to PPC spend, placement, online market share and keyword strategies—and showed agency attendees how they could apply the findings to improve their own clients’ campaigns this holiday season.
More than 30 individuals from 13 different agencies attended and feedback was extremely positive. Thanks to all who attended for helping make it a great event!
AdGooroo Link Building Webinar Thurs. Oct. 6
Posted by Jim on October 3, 2011 to
Join AdGooroo's resident link building expert Eric Ward and AdGooroo CEO Rich Stokes for an informative webinar:
"Inside the Black Box: Debunking the Myths of Link Spam Detection — and How You Can Benefit From It"
Thursday, October 6, 2011 - 1 PM EDT (10 AM PDT)
Eric and Rich will provide an unprecedented look inside the “black box” of the search engines to 1) reveal the formulas being used to determine quality links from spam and 2) debunk the myths surrounding page rank, keyword density, title length, anchor text, word length, high value advertising terms and more.
Google Lithuania Now Available!
Posted by Mike Schiro on September 22, 2011 to Features, Targets
Google Lithuania is now available as a target on AdGooroo.com!
To add monitoring capabilities to a new or an existing keyword group, navigate to the "Manage Accounts" page, select your group (or create a new one) and click on the "Search Engines and Regions" tab.
Yahoo To Turn Off Site Explorer
Posted by Richard Stokes on July 11, 2011 to
Yahoo and Microsoft have announced that Yahoo Site Explorer will be shut down by the end of the year. While Microsoft has promised to offer a replacement backlink reporting tool, the number of links this tool will make available to webmasters is yet uncertain. Like Site Explorer, Google limits backlink data to 1,000 results and also imposes strict throttling limits on tools and other automated agents, so SEOs can expect to face increasing difficulty in procuring this data.
AdGooroo's Chief Linking Evangelist, Eric Ward, had this to say:
"While I'm sad to see YSE go, any of you who have attended my conference sessions at SMX over the years have heard me say that it was only a matter of time before the engines reduced and removed our ability to extract linking info. The link: operator was not an SEO birthright, it was a gift. Now that it's gone, third party data analysis tools like Link Insight become an even more crucial part of the web marketer's arsenal."
Link building constitutes a critical component of the online marketing formula and as such, AdGooroo continues to make substantial investments in crawling infrastructure and capacity. We expect to formally announce our enterprise-grade backlink explorer later this year.
The Rise of Groupon
Posted by Richard Stokes on June 24, 2011 to PPC
In case you hadn't heard, Groupon is growing at an incredibly fast rate. But what isn't so obvious to outsiders is that Groupon competitor LivingSocial.com has been following the same trajectory. Here's a look at their historical PPC spend in the US dating back to January, 2010. These are possibly the two fastest advertising growth curves we've recorded in our database to date:
Click for larger image
Where Are the SEOs Yachts? / QBot 2.0 Going Live Tonight!
Posted by Richard Stokes on April 29, 2011 to link building, link insight, SEO
About a year ago, we unveiled QualityBot ("Qbot" for short”). Qbot at that time was our most successful algorithm for filtering out webspam.
I am pleased to announce that tonight, QBot 2.0 goes into production. With it, Link Insight users will have access to a more comprehensive version of Spam Analyzer, which looks something like this:
The technology behind QBot is complicated, but the motivation behind it is simple: we wanted to increase the number of high quality links our subscribers can find while simultaneously eliminating more spam.
To achieve this, we needed a benchmark. Ours are:
- Precision – how accurate is the model? Eg: does it minimize false positives and false negatives?
- Recall – how much of the target set was passed through the filter? If we started with 1,000 non-spam links and 980 of them made it through, then the recall is 98%.
For both of these metrics, higher numbers are better. A perfect score (which is not attainable) is 100%.
QBot 1.0 scored 83.1% on Precision and 64.5% on Recall. Not bad. To put it in perspective, QBot was performing somewhat better than a trained expert. Given the fact that it could process millions (billions if you count preprocessing) of pages a day, this advantage was significant indeed. After all, who has the time or resources to pursue a list of 300,000 backlinks (and that’s a “small” list according to some backlink vendors).
Those numbers also indicate that the original QBot runs on the aggressive side. At its default setting, we found that it would reduce a pre-filtered link set by 43%. So for every nine spam links identified, five legitimate pages would be incorrectly flagged. Friendly fire. We don’t like that.
Meet the General: GoorooAI
Our latest algorithm is based upon the GoorooAI machine learning platform. GoorooAI is a set of algorithms we use internally for tasks as varied as advertiser vertical assignment, language detection, and so on.
GoorooAI is a metamodeler. It runs millions of model permutations in conjunction with each other to determine effective techniques for identifying spam. The original QBot factors into some of these models. If Qbot is the soldier, then GoorooAI is the general.
How does it compare?
Very favorably. QBot scores 97.6% Precision and 96.7% Recall. For every 28 spam links it removes, there's only one legitimate page misclassified. Overall, it allows 32% more pages through and makes very few errors.
Thinking Like a Search Engine
Webmasters are frustrated by the engines because they lack transparency. Matt Cutts has alluded several times that they need to sensitive to the fact that webspam detection algorithms can be gamed. Fair enough.
However, I would add to this another intriguing possibility: modern webspam detection techniques are so sophisticated that they defy most attempts to easily verbalize the rules of engagement.
Peter Norvig once stated that "PageRank is overhyped". We know that PR is a component of both the webspam and ranking algorithms at Google, but at the end of the day it is a relatively small one. There are many flavors of PageRank and back a few years ago, Google was using at least 8 of them (I personally believe that number has increased today).
We all crave simple, direct answers to our questions. But what GoorooAI has taught us is that there are usually no simple ones.
Allow me to illustrate this with a few examples.
Does TLD Matter?
Let’s start with a simple one: does the TLD (top level domain) give us any indication of the likelihood of spam? You betcha!
You could devise an entire SEO strategy around this one simple chart:
- Procure links on .gov, .us, and .edu TLDs
- Avoid links on .biz, .info. and .jp TLDs
If you know only one rule about link building, this one should be it. However, this strategy has limited application (it’s not that easy to get links on government sites) and it also suffers from the fact that you’re going to miss out on a lot of potential backlinks. Not all .jp sites are spam, and not all .edu pages are trustworthy.
For this reason, the TLD of a potential backlink is of only secondary importance to most link builders. But not for GoorooAI, because it can dynamically adjust to this incredibly valuable datapoint. For instance, it often decides to be tougher on .ru links and to be more lenient on .org links. And it does so with a mathematical precision that even the most skilled linked builders cannot approach.
Title Length
For most of us (especially as we get older… speaking from experience here), we tend to learn once and then get set in our ways. From then on, many of us resist learning from new information.
Machine learning doesn’t suffer from this problem. Here’s a neat example of this. Let’s look at the correlation between spam and title length as it existed in 2005:
In this chart, the columns show the distribution of pages while the pink line shows the probability of a particular page being spam (a “true positive”). Back then, once the title exceeded 30 words, the likelihood of spam increased greatly.
Fast forward to today:
This chart illustrates that the correlation between spam and title length has fallen apart. Today, there’s little you can conclude about a page based solely on the number of words in the Title tag. GoorooAI knows this and puts the proper weight on this variable (essentially none).
Outdegree
Another example of a well-studied factor which influences page reputation is Outdegree – the number of unique hosts linked to by a particular page:
Once a page links to more than 20 domains, the likelihood of its being spam increases greatly. GoorooAI responds to this by subjecting the page to an increasingly more strict webspam detection model.
Amazingly, some marketers still ignore the impact of outdegree. Most directories, link exchange pages, and even legitimate corporate sites which use too many third-party tracking scripts tend to be casualties of this variable.
Where Are the SEOs Yachts?
I know SEOs who still live by the rules they learned a few years ago and haven’t adapted to the ever changing Internet landscape. I see sites which try to figure out how the algorithms work by having SEOs vote on what ranking factors they believe are most important. And of course, there is no shortage of sites which generate metric after endless metric backed up by years of SEO folklore.
Computers are running the show now, folks. You're not going to keep up with "X-Rank", counting keyword occurrences, or whatever the metric-du-jour is. Don’t bring a dinosaur bone to a gun fight.
Stay flexible, keep your link profile clean, and focus on where the customers are and you won’t go wrong.
Eric Ward Answering Link Building Questions on LinkedIn
Posted by Jim on April 26, 2011 to
Got a question on link building or SEO? Eric Ward, the industry’s foremost authority on linking building and Chief Link Evangelist at AdGooroo is now answering questions from AdGooroo group members on LinkedIn! This is a great opportunity to get your questions answered by an expert, as well as benefit from reading Eric’s answers to other SEO professionals’ questions.
How to get your question answered:
1) Join the AdGooroo group on LinkedIn
2) Post your question on Eric's LinkedIn Discussion
3) Check back often -- Eric will answer all questions at a rate of around 2-3 per week
Baidu Brandzone
Posted by Brian on April 5, 2011 to
Adgooroo is now serving Baidu Brandzone ads!
To add monitoring capabilities to a new or an existing keyword group, navigate to the "Manage Accounts" page, select your group (or create a new one) and click on the "Search Engines and Regions" tab.
Has Google Changed Their CPC Formula?
Posted by Richard Stokes on March 17, 2011 to
In October, Google quietly rolled out changes in the manner in which they report keyword traffic estimates. What most advertisers don't know, however, is that there appears to have been a shift in the way CPC prices are being calculated as well.
What Changed?
As I wrote about in chapter 17 of The Ultimate Guide to Pay-Per-Click Advertising, the Google CPC formula has changed a number of times throughout the years. I examined CPC curves across a variety of keywords in different situations (high and low traffic, high and low CPC, high and low quality scores) and gave some general guidelines for what a PPC marketer could expect to encounter in real-world scenarios.
Back then, we saw that CPC prices typically started low near the bottom of the right rail and gradually increased with higher positions. We also discovered that Google was charging a premium of around 49% to "gladiator bidders" - those advertisers who were willing to pay high CPCs but did not have the quality score to break through to the premium positions. A typical CPC curve looked something like the following:
Continue reading "Has Google Changed Their CPC Formula?" »
Google Greece Now Available!
Posted by Mike Schiro on March 3, 2011 to Features, Targets
Google Greece is now available as a target on AdGooroo.com!
To add monitoring capabilities to a new or an existing keyword group, navigate to the "Manage Accounts" page, select your group (or create a new one) and click on the "Search Engines and Regions" tab.
Categories
anchor text (1)
Beta (1)
Conversion Optimization (1)
CPG (2)
Day Parting (1)
Display Advertising (1)
Email Marketing (1)
Eric Ward (2)
Fastest Growing Categories (3)
Features (39)
Forecasting (1)
General (2)
Geotargeting (1)
Google AdWords (1)
Landing Pages (1)
Link Building (14)
link building (5)
link insight (3)
link signals (1)
MarketingSherpa (1)
Mentions (3)
PageRank (1)
Perry Marshall (1)
PPC (9)
Press Releases (1)
public relations (1)
Research (5)
search rank (1)
SEM Insight (2)
SEO (2)
Targets (19)
Trademark Insight (1)
Trademark Protection (1)
Traffic (1)
Ultimate Guide (3)
Webinar (5)