'Net Features : 81009

Trellian’s Keyword Discovery Goes Pro

Pete Prestipino — Mon, 10 Aug 2009 21:06:00 GMT

Keyword research platform Keyword Discovery (a service of Trellian) announced a professional-level plan today and it’s worth a look.

Under KeywordDiscovery's professional plan; search marketers have the ability to set up unlimited projects and will receive:

- a Competitive Intelligence (CI) subscription to monitor a competitor's referring traffic sources, natural search queries, paid search terms, ranked terms, and subdomains,

- access to an expanded version of the Domain Researcher Tool (useful in finding which domains are registered, available, or for sale, based on keyword research).

- access to a stand alone version of the Keyword Cross Reference Tool (which enables marketers to enter a URL along with target keywords, and view a breakdown of those keywords on a competitor's webpage),

- access to a stand alone version of the Keyword Permutations Tool, which enables them to enter a list of comma separated keywords and view all combinations of those keywords that show up in KeywordDiscovery's massive database of searches.

Other professional level features and tools includes Keyword Density Checker, access to the Keyword Management Tool to filter and manage keywords, and access to Yahoo PPC Bid values for checking current pricing for keywords in Paid Search.

Will Yahoo! Deals Give Merchant a Leg Up In Recession?

Pete Prestipino — Mon, 10 Aug 2009 19:20:00 GMT

Yahoo! is tuning in to the needs of its merchants (and paid close attention to some telling search queries) and consumers launching Yahoo! Deals today - and none too soon either. Comscore released its Q2 2009 retail e-commerce sales estimates today which showed that U.S online retail spending totaled $30.2 billion, down 1 percent versus a year ago.

The deals site provides consumers access to daily deals and coupons, and features social and community features. “Frugality is the new ‘cool,’” said Greg Hintz, head of Yahoo! Shopping. “We now know that couponing and bargain hunting are losing their stigma and are now a regular habit for many people. Our goal at Yahoo! is to be the center of people’s online lives and we’re making Yahoo! the easiest place for consumers to find and manage the coupons and deals that are relevant to their lives.”

In a recent Yahoo! survey, 43 percent of participants said they are using coupons more since last year. They also cited that easier access to coupons would motivate them to use coupons more often, a sentiment stated by 76 percent of women. That said, the majority of people polled feel that there are not currently enough coupons for things they want to buy and nearly half actually think coupon hunting is a chore. Less than a fifth of consumers have a “go-to” online site and almost 80 percent think the process of finding coupons is difficult.

No information was immediately available about how merchants could participate in Yahoo! Deals. One can only assume that you’ll need to be either a Yahoo! Merchant, advertising with Yahoo! or participating in their paid syndication program.

Tracking.Net Is One to See at SES

Pete Prestipino — Mon, 10 Aug 2009 18:32:00 GMT

If you’re anything like me you visit hundreds of websites each day. And if you’re visiting that many (or even if you’re not) you’re well aware of how slowly many sites load. You might have even noticed this on your own site and wondered what’s causing the holdup.

The cause more often than not is numerous sets of advertising and tracking tags that make up the final rendered page – each of which can take a substantial amount of time for a visitor's browser to execute (load). For example, say you’re running banners from two ad servers, some third-party widgets, analytics code, etc.

Having too many of these tags ultimately can result in a degraded user experience and potentially lower organic and paid search rankings. Tracking.net this week will release NETcelerate, an integration platform for advertising and analytics tags that's designed to eliminate the burden of tag execution and increase a website’s speed. All ad and tracking tags are initiated in parallel, then the results are aggregated together and returned in a single object to the browser. It's set up so that the server acts as a tethered browser on behalf of the real browser.

SEM Insight Shows Marketers What Competitors Spend Online

Pete Prestipino — Mon, 10 Aug 2009 18:13:00 GMT

AdGooroo, a provider of competitive search engine intelligence, announced three new features of its SEM Insight offering.

Perhaps the most interesting of the new features is in Budget Analyzer. The forecasting tool enables marketers to track and respond to competitors’ paid search impressions, clicks, click through rates and total spend. Budget Analyzer combines data from a number of sources into a model which predicts traffic, searcher click behavior, quality scores, and the average CPC for every ad seen in your targeted keywords.

AdGooroo also integrated AdWords Data Calibration and Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Traffic Estimator into SEM Insight. These features enable marketers to import their Google AdWords campaigns to improve budget estimates and obtain estimates for competitors' organic search clicks and click through rates to track and compare their own organic traffic for Google, Yahoo! and Bing to that of their competitors.

“With the addition of Budget Analyzer to SEM Insight, advertisers can now see not only their competitors’ search traffic, impressions and other optimization efforts, but also what they spend,” said AdGooroo Founder and Chief Gooroo Rich Stokes. “Enabling marketers to see how competitors spend their ad dollars online offers a leg up on the competition and the ability to achieve the greatest possible return on their search investment.”

ShareThis Widget Update Rolling Out

Pete Prestipino — Mon, 10 Aug 2009 17:47:00 GMT

Website publishers using the ShareThis widget will see some improvements to the tool rolling out over the coming weeks.

Improvements include shorter widget load time for better page load performance, sign-in support (for Facebook, Google, Yahoo, and Microsoft) for increased engagement, some personalization features and analytics.

The updated widget will also provide users with recommendations for sites that will share other top content from your site.

Looking for more tools like ShareThis?
Request a professional-level subscription to Website Magazine!