Neil Shearing’s Internet Marketing Strategies

Interesting changes made by Microsoft to their Adcenter (their equivalent of Google’s Adwords).

- Microsoft may use matching criteria other than keyword searches
to display your advertisements.

- Microsoft may display your advertisements on its network of
advertising channels operated by the Microsoft network of
participating websites and other distribution outlets.

What the heck does “matching criteria other than keyword searches” mean?

I’ll have to look further into that. I’m not sure what they could mean… they’re going to use some kind of Mind-meld interface to read the thoughts of MSN users? “You typed doggie biscuits but we think you meant to type doggie treats. Here are the ads you would’ve seen if you typed what you were actually thinking about“.

And, the second note… MSN will show your ads on their network of sites… like Google shows Adwords ads on sites displaying Adsense.

Good idea, that.

Microsoft. Reading your mind. And Googles.

(hmmm, perhaps point one leads to two. After all, if Microsoft is going to show your ads on other people’s sites, they have to show ads that haven’t been triggered by a keyword search. Instead, the ads will be triggered on websites with content that matches your ads.)

Either way, it’s interesting that there’s no opt-out. I guess you either accept the conditions or take your business elsewhere.

Hey, it doesn’t matter anyway, really, does it?

We all like to keep track of certain “metrics”, be they PageRank, Alexa Ranking, Daily Site Visitors, EPC, CPM and other alphabet soup.

But, the only one that really matters, from a business perspective, is profit.

Yes, Google may deign to let us know the PageRank for our pages every few months. (even though they, naturally, update their internal pagerank scores much more often than that)

Yes, if you sell links on your sites based on the site’s PageRank, you may find your site’s PageRank directly relates to your profits, which makes it a more important number to you.

But, in general, it isn’t a hugely important number to most people. You can make a fortune without PageRank… just ask anyone who has put up a salesletter for a new product, emailed their lists and made a huge amount of money from sales of the new product… without any PageRank at all. Or someone who earns money buying clicks then sending them to other sites… click flippers. They don’t need PageRank.

Almost all my sites stayed at PageRank 5, so the latest toolbar export didn’t have me jumping up and down.

Apparently a lot of sites saw their PageRank fall. I’ve also heard, from personal communication, of sites rising in PageRank.

So there were winners, losers and people unaffected.

Sounds about right to me.

Now… let’s look at profits instead, shall we?