allinanchor.com | Internet Marketing News and Tips » Microsoft

How Top Brands Stay on Top: Advertising

dwhite — Sat, 20 Oct 2007 18:57:54 +0000

Do you ever wonder how top brands like Coca-Cola, Microsoft and Google can always compete with the best of them? It’s all about how much they spend on advertising.

So here are the numbers by percent of revenue spent on advertising in 2006, believe me these were shocking to me too.

Microsoft - $11.5 billion (20% of revenue)
Coca-Cola - $2.5 billion
Yahoo - $1.3 billion (20% of revenue)
eBay - $871 million (15% of revenue - most on Google advertising)
Google - $188 million
Starbucks - $95 million

(more…)

Microsoft is Going to Handle SEO Spam… Yeah Right.

Michael — Thu, 19 Jul 2007 16:59:05 +0000

Apparently Microsoft has been working on a new technology that will scrub your search results of “spam” websites. Spam sites are typically those sites that are created with no real content or purpose other than to funnel traffic through to an advertiser or profit generating site. The most common of these are called “doorway pages” but other a new kind of spam using blogs has also become mainstream for search engine spammers.

The new approach is a basic, if novel, idea:

Microsoft’s tool doesn’t find spam the traditional way, by looking at the site’s content. Instead, it turns the spammers’ activities against them by using search engines to find links to potential spam pages. These links are often posted as comments on blogs, in online discussion forums and in guestbooks, also called “comment spam”.

Only time will tell, in the meantime you can learn more here: Strider URL Tracer

Microsoft and Ask.com Partner Up

Michael — Wed, 12 Jul 2006 14:44:55 +0000

According to this article at InformationWeek, Microsoft has reached an agreement with Ask.com to syndicate their paid search listings on the Ask.com network. This is a big step for Microsoft, which doesn’t have a large portion of the market share.

The company's Web sites captured about 13% of all search traffic in June, according to market watcher Comscore. The addition of Ask.com's sites to its paid search service will expose Microsoft's customer listings to an additional 5% of search traffic.

Representing a jump of about 35% in market share, this will give advertisers on Microsoft’s adManager a chance to reach more of their target market. This doesn’t really compare to the volume of search that Google and Yahoo are providing to their customers, but it’s a good start.

If you are participating in the adManager Beta, this is probably good news to you. If not, I don’t see this as reason enough to sign up. In my opinion, it’s still a better bet to go with Yahoo Search Marketing, or Google Adwords. They both have more mature user interfaces, and they both provide superior reach.