Asking about what would complement someone best — what a nice and effective way to discuss someone’s less strong areas.

Our thanks to the MSN engineers for the many calls and emails clarifying the V5.1 API docs. These are places we hit snags.

RSS is about content, not presentation.

“In social networks, on the other hand, users show up to find friends; ads are, at best, irrelevant to that goal.” Byran Urstadt, Tech Review

Some thoughts on a recent Shop.org thread: should online retailers pitch their channel as a money-saving response to that increasingly costly drive to the mall?

Part 3 of a 10 part series on the attributes of top-tier bid management systems. Today we focus on the power of feeding post-sale information into your bidding system.

Dell’s direct marketing has always been impressive, but this recent full page branding ad in the New Yorker left me befuddled.

It is an important time for the affiliate industry: alot of retailers are starting to question where affiliate marketing fits in their world. — Larry Joseloff, Shop.org

Looking at our agency’s client base in aggregate, last month Google received 79% of our clients’ ad dollars. Yahoo received 17%. Microsoft received 5%.

Softball, mysql, and Bush.

George Michie wrote a solid SEL post on the perils of overly-automated keyword generating systems.

Mia Brennan, a Senior Analyst at RKG, shares research on the impact of today’s turbulent economy on PPC campaigns for her clients.

“But one thing that struck me is that I just found out today that the way AdSense works is we don’t actually know how much of a cut we’re getting. We just take their ads and run them on our site and they send us a check at the end of the month, and we trust them to give us a fair amount of whatever they were paid, though there’s no actual way to determine what a fair amount might be.” - FJY

Here’s a new RKGDuck video showing how in a couple minutes you can write a powerful filter to assist with cleaning up keyword lists.

For the third year, we’re proud to have sponsored the annual North American Perl conference, a great geek conference which occurred last week in Chicago.

Keywords, bids, and matchtypes — those are the big levers of paid search. To get your PPC programs generating maximum profit, focus there first.

Last week Google and Yahoo announced an agreement by which Yahoo would be allowed to selectively serve Google ads along side search results on Yahoo.com and Yahoo’s partner sites, and take advantage of Google’s Content ad platform as well.

Measuring new customer acquisitions and lifetime value calculations applies not only to traditional marketing, but paid search too.

The second of a ten part series on what is required of top tier bid management platforms in 2008.

I raised a great many hackles at IRCE in Chicago on Monday 6/9 pointing out some of the important issues associated with Affiliate Marketing. Did I go too far? Yes and No.

Site search is a conversation, a chance to listen to your customer and respond. Tune it up, and it has the potential to be one of the most ROI-positive investments you’ll make in your site. Is your site search providing maximum return?

May 2008 search engine share results aggregated across RKG clients: steady, no big change. Google at 81%.

Microsoft to pay HP to make Live the default search engine in IE on new HP machines. Meanwhile, Ffox adoption continues to grow.

Ever wondered how Google decides questions ranging from how many results to serve on a page, to the amount of whitespace with which to pad the logo and the most effective color with which to tint the sponsored link box at the top of the page?

“The only way to grow your business long-term is through this process of turning your customers into your sales force.”
- Fred Reichheld