Cost-Per-Action Advertising for Survey Promotion?

I am reading a book on conducting surveys, so surveys are on the brain. Talking to Susan Saurage at the AAF conference last week may have contributed to my current mind set. So when I saw this post:

Google Launches ValueClick Killer
The Google AdSense team would like to invite you to test a feature that provides you with a new way to earn revenue from your website by hosting ads that are compensated based on a Cost-Per-Action [CPA] basis.

My first thought was – sure you could use that for affiliate marketing, but Cost-Per-Action would also be a great low cost way to drive completed surveys. I like the microwork concept from mturk but that is such a small subset of people. PPC for surveys is problematic because most people do NOT want to take a survey when seeking something. They want to find something at that point.
But I believe an image marketing type ad soliciting survey completion without any direct compensation to the respondent might produce a balanced result. File this under "to be tested."

The picture? That has nothing to do with this post. It is just the most ridiculous advertising I have seen lately. And a terrible brand name; how can you differentiate "nutrition on sale"? Uuuugh. Maybe they need some cost per action advertising. <grin>

HitTail – Web Analytics from a PR Firm?

Via Marketing Shift a PR agency has created an SEO “long tail” optimization tool. From the Marketing Shift post:

A free program organizes “long tail” data about how people found your
site through natural search and suggests keywords to use for search
engine optimization.

and

PR Firm Connors Communications, which wrote the MyLongTail software (now located at HitTail.com),
is also touting the merits of blogging and public relations to create
content that is effective in garnering natural search instead of over
paying for paid search.

The HitTail site has an 8 minute demo (sorry, 8 minutes is a LOOOONG TIME!). From viewing the demo, it looks like Google Analytics with a clear visualization of more than your top 25 inbound search words.

UPDATE: Please see the comments section on the latest from HitTail!

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Voter Fatigue Skews Search Engine Results for the Aristrocracy

Voter fatigue, in political science parlance, refers to people literally getting tired of voting. Of if they vote, perhaps they vote the major ticket but block vote the rest because who the heck knows there the 2nd District Court is anyway, right?

David Berkowitz in today’s SearchInsider argues this phenomenon is coming to search. From the MediaInsider article "The Aristrocracy of Relevance" (reg required unfortunately)

the search engines and their hundreds of
millions of users will soon find themselves subjugating to a new ruling
class: the Aristocracy of Relevance. The whole search engine marketing
business was much easier when the search engines were the arbiters of
relevance.

and it continues

Now, we have tagging. With the engines’ new services, anyone can label
a search result as he or she sees fit, and the search engine recognizes
the categorization (within reason). The old model might be viewed as a
benevolent dictatorship or even as enlightened absolutism; the new
model is a democracy–power to the people. Yet most people won’t take
advantage of this power.

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Google and Accoona for “Perception of Public Relations” – Accoona no match!

I received an email that made me curious about the difference between Accoona (which I had not
heard of) and Google (ya, someone told me about google once) on understanding the context of a search. From the Accoona site:

Accoona Artificial Intelligence is a Search Technology that understands
the meaning of search queries beyond the conventional method of
matching keywords.

and

Accoona’s Artificial Intelligence uses the meaning of words to get you better searches.

The email was from a PR agency so of course I searched on "perception of public relations" in both search engines.

Everyone loves an underdog, particularly an underdog victory. But alas, such is not the case with Accoona. Google pretty much trounced them in my very unscientific comparison. This is one search, one test, yada yada and I look forward to checking back with Accoona.

One thing Accoona can do immediately to improve results is kill all of the advertising at the top. Obviously the ad engine is not as advanced as the search engine part. As a user advertising at the top IS search results. Right hand ads are extra stuff to me. But note that even without the top 3 ad served results, google still produced more of what I was specifically looking for.

Perhaps pay some turkers to evaluate a larger quantity of results, hopefully in a double blind test? But I don’t think PR alone, perception or not, is going to raise Accoona above Google in my perception any time soon.

Houston Interactive Marketing Group Kickoff Event

Houston has launched the Houston Interactive Marketing Group.  The organization has been primarily coordinated by Steve Latham of Spur Digital.  The HiMA kickoff event is coming up this Thursday the 26th and we will have several people attending from our team.

<snip from the site>Please join us for our New Year Kick-Off event, January 26, from 7:30 to 9:30 am at the Houston Technology Center. Geoffrey Ramsey, founder and CEO of eMarketer will be the keynote speaker.</snip>

The following are the founding members of the Houston Interactive Marketing Association (HiMA). BMC Software Fogarty Klein Monroe Gulf Publishing Halliburton Houston Chronicle Houston Technology Center Human Kind Inc.

Idea Integration InfoVine Interactive Lopez Negrete Money Management International One Real World PennWell Publishing Pierpont Communications Questia Media, Inc. Schipul – The Web Marketing Company Sam Houston Area Council Six Foot Studios Spur Digital Texas Children’s Hospital Zephyr Salvo Studios

AdSense Blogs Needed Response – at least that is what my Vanity Searches Suggest

Vanity searches, before we called them vanity searches they were more "competitive intelligence" and "monitoring your position on the Internet".  Now they produce random results.  The faster our clients syndicate with RSS the faster our name shows up in some …er… unsavory places.

Example: http://www.technorati.com/search/schipul

Some legit.  Some not.  I’d like to think that google can filter the rank value of inbound links to our properties and not have it affect us negatively in our rankings.  And perhaps the sucking sound of RSS feeds from our client sites into splogs may seem harmless, but I for one am glad to see Google taking action.

A new addition to the Quality Score

In August, we introduced the Quality Score along with the launch of quality-based minimum bids, letting you know that we evaluate many factors, such as your ad text and clickthrough rate (CTR) to determine the minimum bid for your keyword. Today, we started incorporating a new factor into the Quality Score — the landing page — which will look at the content and layout of the pages linked from your ads.

Why are we doing this? Simply stated, we always aim to improve our users’ experience so that these users (your potential customers) will continue to trust and value AdWords ads. Have you ever searched on a keyword, found an ad that seemed to be exactly what you wanted, and then clicked on it only to find a site that had little to do with what you were searching for? It’s not a great experience.

Note – awesome fractal image from http://www.fractalism.com