RadarFarms Press

As everybody who is involved in SEO even a little bit knows - keyword meta tags aren’t like they used to be.

There is so much was written about rise and demise of this particular meta tag for increasing Search Engine Rankings. The best opus on this subject, IMHO, was Meta Keywords Tag 101: How To “Legally” Hide Words On Your Pages For Search Engines.

As we always boasted, we never been involved in SEO of any kind and even launched anti-SEO radar SEO - Myths and Truth.

However, after we migrated to WordPress platform for our new site, we have been penalized by mighty Google both in terms of indexing of our new radars and quality of served AdSense ads.

We tried several tricks recommended by Google and bloggers but to no avail. Eventually, we resorted to good ol’ keyword meta tags by writting a stored procedure that automatically injected tags from radar’s Tag Clouds into keyword metatag for a page hosting it. We didn’t pin too many hopes on a quick exit from Google Sandbox but rather hoped that Yahoo and other guys will bring us a bit more traffic and quality of AdSense ads will improve (the keyword meta tags still could influence AdSense).

Then we compared our AdSense KPIs before and after the Tag Cloud tag injection into the radar’s keyword meta tags, which happen by EOD on 02/07 and results are very impressive to say at least:

Number of daily impressions (which is also the site traffic indicator) went up from 637 to 789 (24% increase).

Daily CTR went up from 1.08% to 1.8% (67%)

Daily eCPM (average payout of served ads) went up from $2.51 to $4.60 (83% increase).

We also digged into GA and compared the site KPIs for 01/28-02/07 (they are marked as pervious) to 02/08-02/18 (they are in bold):

9,477 Visits

Previous: 6,534 (+45.04%)

14,426 Pageviews

Previous: 11,847 (+21.77%)

1.52 Pages/Visit

Previous: 1.81 (-16.05%)

72.09% Bounce Rate

Previous: 57.90% (+24.51%)

00:00:46 Avg. Time on Site

Previous: 00:01:03 (-26.38%)

92.56% % New Visits

Previous: 90.80% (+1.94%)

Impact on traffic directed from Search Engines was even more stunning - 309.9% increase:

Google visits were up from 1,255 to 5,268 (320%), Yahoo visits increased from 51 to 168 (230%) and AOL traffic went up from 19 to 63 (232%).

Below is percentage of traffic originated from Search Engines and, as we anticipated, non-Google SEs increased their share:

While this result is not completely surprising, quantitive impact is what really surpised us. It means that rumours about the keyword meta tags greatly exaggerated!

As you may or may not know, we officially launched 77Radars - Long Tail advertising service, which represents a viable cost-efficient no-hassle alternative to traditional Natural Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and/or Paid Search/Pay-per-Click (PPC). The idea is that most pay-per-click (PPC) advertising is aimed at 1-2 word search queries. Yet, over 80% of web traffic comes from highly-specific, “long tail” (3 words or more) search queries.  

Thanks to its role as an informational source and aggregator for odd “long tail” search queries, RadarFarms allows the new hosted radars to be indexed and ranked high by Google and other major search engines in a very short period time (sometimes as short as 1 day). 

Seventy seven (77) pre-built News Radars, each delivering a combination of highly focused content and tag clouds indexed by Search Engines allows Radars to get high Search Engine Ranking (SER), and designed to be considered high authority’s source by the Engines. 

New Radars “piggyback” on high ranking on the whole site and get high SER in very short time. 

Your website’s banner and links placed at one of our News Radars will drive high-quality traffic, which will bring more revenue than the traffic coming through generic (one- or two-word) keywords targeted by traditional SEO since it represents a bigger part of Natural Search traffic and visitors coming through the long tail keywords are also more willing to buy than those who are coming through the generic queries. 

For sixteen months prior to launching the 77Radars, we have been running three Sponsored Radars: 

·          Toronto Real Estate

 ·          Web Software for Associations and Non-Profits 

·          Sports Fans Online  

These radars carried the advertiser’ banners and we had sufficient time to monitor the radar’s traffic as well clicks on the banners. The chart below indicates stats for the Sponsored Radars collected from 11/24/2006 to 12/16/2007: 

The  best Click Through Rate (CTR) – 20.1% was achieved by Sports Fans Online radar sponsored by YourSportsFan.com – a sport fan’s networking site.  

Another sponsor’ banner – WildApricot – Web-based Membership Software hosted at Web Software for Associations and Non-Profits radar also enjoyed quite decent CTR of 7.1%. 

The most popular Sponsored Radar - Toronto Real Estate – sponsored by Toronto Real Estate agent Rita Munits didn’t get too many clicks and her banner’s CTR was just 1.8%. The latter modest CTR could be explained by the fact that the Real Estate selling and buying still remains rather a brick-and-mortar business than an online one unlike the other sponsors, which are “pure” online businesses.                    

Since the first and, so far, only web bubble, we’ve seen some crazy developments happen in the online space.  From the idea of a video game without a purpose, to everyone and their aunt becoming as important as CNN, the world seems like a completely different place in many ways.  Everything is either already decentralized or quickly heading there (like Al Qaeda eluding the world’s greatest super power, or Wikipedia replacing Brittanica Online).  The overwhelming message to anyone who is willing to listen is this: you cannot depend on authority.  Winning today means embracing chaos.

In the midst of chaos, information is king.  Knowing the latest news before your competition (or enemy) is crucial.  This is as true for a soldier in Iraq as it is for a young entrepreneur struggling to survive.  Knowledge is power.

As the CNNs of the world struggle to catch up, the John’s and Jane’s of the world are learning to use independent sources for their knowledge.  We have Technorati, Digg, Slashdot.  And we have Newsmastering.

This is important.  People often just don’t get why they would want to customize the news for themselves.   Isn’t the New York Times sufficient?  In short, no.  Here are some quotes from people more famous than I to illustrate the point:

“Sure I read news papers.  Problem is the news is a day old.” - attributed to David Weinberger

“News is what somebody somewhere wants to suppress; all the rest is advertising.” - Lord Northcliffe

“People everywhere confuse what they read in newspapers with news.” - A. J. Liebling quotes

See, The News (capitalized and official) is always slow, filtered, and editorialized.  It can’t be trusted in any useful sort of way.

Newsmastering, on the other hand, means listening to the rapid, vast and unfiltered wisdom of crowds.  Newsmastering means listening to the world, not an editor.  Newsmastering means having the news that matters to you come to you, quickly.

Newsmastering means finding a haven of understanding in a sea of chaos.

Ever feel like you just can’t keep up with all the news in your industry? Ever find yourself caught off guard by some big event you should have known about, but somehow missed? This used to happen to me all the time.

At one point, I was following over 600 blogs in the hopes of staying on top of my industry (being marketing). See, I’m with the marketing agency One Up Marketing. (My name is Mario, by the way, and I work with RadarFarms.) We specialize in web startups and virtual worlds, both of which have very active communities. It’s next to impossible to follow it all.

A few months ago, when we first met RadarFarms, we created our first ever News Radar. To be frank, I didn’t know what to expect. I’d never heard of newsmastering, and RSS mashups didn’t strike me as all that interesting at the time.

Since that time, life has gotten much easier. Instead of starting my day with a few hours of skimming thousands of blog posts, I now spend a few minutes glancing at our News Radar. It’s great. See, the problem was that those 600+ blogs didn’t all write exclusively on topics that interested me. But I had to follow them because sometimes they did, and I didn’t want to miss out.

With RadarFarms’ News Radars, I was able to specify what I was interested in. Now, only the stuff that’s relevant to me comes my way.

It gets even better though.

Since I’d learned to become the master of my news, I was wondering if I could share that with people. I’d created a great portal to all the news that was fit to my interests, so why not share that (and get credit for it)?

RadarFarms created this wonderful widget for me. You can see it here, under “Latest News from the Metaverse”. Now, our website (which hosts a monthly magazine) has fresh daily content, attracting visitors without my having to do a thing.

In short, RadarFarms has taken the work out of reading and spreading the news. It’s my news, my way.

Google AdWords flipped the advertising industry on its head with a very simple idea. Advertise to people when, and only when, they’re searching for what you’re selling. Why waste money advertising on people who aren’t interested? With AdWords, advertisers were finally in control.  As long as we know what search terms people will use to find us, we’re all set.

The problem is, how can we know what terms people will use to find us?

If you go to your favorite search engine and type in “ice cream”, that’s very generic. “Ice cream” can refer to the thousands of different flavors, the different companies who produce them, the production process, the ingredients, the history of ice cream, etc etc. In short, “ice cream” isn’t given any context. As a result, your search results won’t be very relevant to you. What every Internet user learns very quickly is that we can refine our searches by adding more words. So, if you’re interested in learning how to make ice cream, you might literally search “how to make ice cream”.  You added words to clarify what you want to know.  We call these clarified search queries “long tail search terms”.The problem, for advertisers, is it’s almost impossible to know what someone will type into that search box. With AdWords, you need to specify which search queries you want to advertise on.

Did you know…

• …that over 80% of web traffic is generated from long tail search queries?
• …that every month, twenty percent of all searches done on Google are search terms that are brand new to the engine?

That last one is the really startling. 20%! That means 1 out of every 5 search queries has never, ever, been conducted before.

Let’s translate that in terms of what it means for your advertising dollar:

• If you can’t think of every relevant long tail search query someone might use to find your product, you’re missing out on over 80% of the web.
• 20% of the time, people interested in what you’re selling are using terms Google’s never heard of before.
• The people you are advertising to, the people you’re paying good money to reach, are mostly not all that interested in you. They’re being advertised to based on generic terms, because getting specific is far too difficult.

We’re faced with a bit of a dilemma. On the one hand, the people who are the most interested in buying from you are the ones using detailed search queries (like “double chocolate ice cream”). On the other hand, if you’re in the ice cream business, it’s simply not realistic to try to take into account all the different ways someone might search for your products. Sure, you might compile a list of every flavor. But with every word, every new combination of words, the list of potential search terms increases exponentially in complexity. It’s just not doable.

What can you do? Are we really stuck paying for generic traffic in the hopes that someone might be willing to buy?

Isn’t there a better way?

Enter News Radars.  Let’s say you create a Radar for “ice cream”, that generic search term mentioned above.  Our News Radars will scour the web for any mention of “ice cream”.  Over time, this all gets collected in your News Radar, and, more importantly, search engines see that.  That means whenever anyone on the web writes something about “double chocolate ice cream”, which contains our generic term “ice cream”, it will show up in the News Radar.  Which means your News Radar will now be indexed by the search gods for, among a great list of long tail search terms, “double chocolate ice cream”.

News Radars become aggregators (collection buckets) for long tail search terms!

Think about that for a moment.  You can’t possibly think of every search query someone might use to find you.  But there’s a pretty good chance someone, at some point, will use those words in a blog posting or article somewhere on the Web.  Since your News Radar will find those, the Radar becomes associated, in the eyes of the search engines, with all of those long tail search terms.  People searching for “double chocolate ice cream” will find your Radar. A Radar you can advertise on.

Long Tail Aggregation Advertising

If you’re interested in exploring alternatives to the existing ad models, give us a shout.  Within the next month or so we’ll be launching a new service and some new features to help you take advantage of the Long Tail.

We are about to launch our new advertising offering - 77Radars - and we are running Case Study to understanding how this offering is stacking up against two pillars of Internet Marketing - Natural Search (a.k.a Search Engine Optimization or SEO) and Paid Search (a.k.a Pay-per-Click or PPC).

Therefore, we decided awhile ago in mid-April, 2007 to set up a PPC campaign for our two radars dedicated to niche subjects - Tuvan Stamps and Vintage Massandra Wines.

We decided to use services of an absolute champion of all PPC services - celebrated Google AdWords. Don’t get us wrong - we all know and admit that the service is excellent, or otherwise Google would never be the Google as we know it. However,  our impressions from the set-up were mixed.

The AdWords user interface is not bad but for an individual who never done it before, it is sort of too complicated.

Initially, after the account setup, one should set up a max Cost per Click and daily budget. We set up $0.12 CAD as a max cost-per-click (CPC) and $0.42 CAD as max daily budget. It would match $11 of targeted monthly cost for sponsors of 77Radars.

Google scanned the Massandra radar’s Recent Items page and came up with some keywords. I added “Massandra” and added the keywords I felt as most appropriate. Then I used “View Traffic Estimator” tool by Google. The tool allows estimating average CPC, Ad Position, daily Clicks and Cost.

For Massandra, the tool estimated that the average cost would be $0.09 CAD and 0-1 clicks a day.

After we set up the Massandra campaign, we ran Google AdWords External Keyword Tool and the keywords it proposed were different from the internal tool.

Then, we checked the campaign status and turned out that 3 keywords related to Sotheby’s were out of reach because they started at $0.23-0.46 CPC that wasn’t indicated by the internal tool initially.

The bottom line - Google didn’t have any bidder for “Massandra” keyword yet but us. We were going to add some keywords later but the whole process was not for a mere mortal - it is for sure.

The same process was a bit less complicated for Tuvan Stamps which was set up by me for the same CPC and daily budget as the Massandra radar. Google has one bidder for “Tuvan Stamps” keyword, which is ranked as Pos 1.

We added “rare stamps” keyword, where we were OK from the CPC/budget’s standpoint but, according to the Traffic Estimator, could have positioned as 4-6. When we checked Sponsored Links for “rare stamps“, we were not there.

The Traffic Estimator informed us that the average CPC would be $0.06-0.12 and number of daily clicks would be 0-1, however, for $3.35 max CPC and daily $10 budget, they will bump me up to #1 position for the keywords picked by us.

We used the External Keyword tool for the Tuvan keywords, and it wasn’t very different from the internal tool.

Again, we initially intended to fine tune our campaigns, but then we decided to leave them alone and probably this way we just mimicked behavior of an average “Advertiser Joe” who will not fix it if it ain’t broken.

We haven’t noticed too much traffic brought to us through AdWords but then on June 30 our campaign for the Massandra radar ended. We don’t remember that we set up this date but nevertheless decided not resume it because for 2.5 months since the campaign was launched, we just received one visit via this source.

We checked the campaign and had quite a few questions though:

All our keywords had “Inactive for Search” status.

Google defines this status as “A keyword is marked inactive for search if it doesn’t have a high enough Quality Score and cost-per-click (CPC) bid to trigger ads on Google or the search network. This means your keyword’s CPC bid doesn’t meet the quality-based minimum bid.”

Three out of ten keywords selected for the campaign had OK Quality Score so it must have been a low bid. Indeed, Google asked for the OK keywords to increase minimum bid from our low-budget $0.12 to $0.35 - not too shabby. That’s how the price went up. It was surprising, because “crimea ukraine” still doesn’t have any bidders while “Massandra” keyword just has one - eBay. We cannot help but make a conclusion that Google decided that it will be better off not serving any ads for the “crimea ukraine” at all, rather than having a low-paying advertiser. The same conclusion could be applied for “Massandra” where apparently eBay shelled out required $0.35 per click and mighty Google decided that it doesn’t want the lower bidders.

Let’s fast-track now and check our more successful AdWords campaign for Tuvan Stamps:

For 6.5 months since we launched the campaign, we received 302 clicks - not bad indeed. However, as of today all five keywords we selected are inactive for search. It is the same pattern as we saw with the Massandra campaign. Keywords with high Average Position and OK Quality Score are inactivated, and Google demands more monies for a minimum bid. The increase is not as dramatic as it was with Massandra but still the CPC went up from $0.12 to $0.18 and “Tuvan Stamps” keyword has just one bidder while “Tuva Stamps” keyword has two bidders.

Anyway, now we need to make a decision whether we will continue the campaign or let it end.

We also noticed that even when the above keywords were active, our ad had not been always served for the reasons unknown to us.

New metric by Google “Impression Share” helped us to understand why. Google defines it as: Impression share is a new metric that represents the percentage of times your ads were shown (i.e. your accrued impressions) out of the total number of page impressions (i.e. pages where your ad appeared or could have appeared) in the market you were targeting.

It means that Google is not always serving ads even if it could. Here we need to give a credit to Google because via their advanced reporting one could understand why Google is passing on an ad. They allow the AdWords user to add couple of sub-metrics to the Campaign report and see whether the Impression Share (IS) is lost due to poor Rank or low Budget (see our Campaign Reports below):

That’s how Google defines these values:

The ‘Lost IS’ columns reflects a portion of the total page impressions you were eligible for that were lost due to budget or rank reasons. To illustrate,

Your impression share + Lost IS (Budget) + Lost IS (Rank) = 100%.

Please note that we do not report lost impression share measures below 10% because the values may not be meaningful based on the volume of data available. These values are expressed as ‘N/A’ in the columns.

• Lost IS (Budget)
  You are losing impression share due to an insufficient budget.
• Lost IS (Rank)
  A poor Ad Rank (cost-per-click bid x Quality Score) is reducing your impression share. You may want to try adjusting your keyword match type to achieve a higher impression share.

Good news - we didn’t lose any IS due to low monthly budget, bad news - we lost 86% chances to be served for our Tuvan Stamps keywords apparently due to low cost-per-click bid.

We were so “impressed” by Google Impression Share (no pun intended) that decided to start monitoring the subject and created AdWords Impression Share radar.

Hopefully, our little AdWords saga may help niche online vendors or little guys like us to make an intelligent decision on how to spend scarce advertising dollars.

All and all, Google AdWords is created to maximize the Google profits (nothing is wrong with it) and if your niche is too narrow and not quite popular in terms of web traffic, Google trying to offset its overhead expenses to serve your online ad with increasing CPC even if there are not any bidders or just few of them.

We also learnt that in order to run the successful campaign, you should monitor it closely yourself or, if you are not able to do it for whatever reason, outsource to AdWords campaign managers/consultants. In the latter case, hiring the AdWords pundits could significantly increase advertising costs - see our AdWords Campaign Management radar. 

Somebody placed a link to our HitTail Buzz radar at famous social bookmarking site StumbleUpon.com on September 25 and we suppose that it was at its Stumble Buzz page. As a result, we received 374 visits and 646 pageviews from eager Stumblers.  The burst was so intensive that we suspected even a Denial of Service (DOS) attack. During 1.5 hours, the radar was hit over 250 times. Then it is a bit faded away:  

When the dust settled, we had a record number of daily pageviews since we started using Google Analytics on November24, 2006 - 1163 and the largest number of visits since February 26, 2007 – 706. We couldn’t locate who placed the link but we know that Mike Levin – a guy behind HitTail – has link to our radar at his StumbleUpon page. 

The StumbleUpon burst proved a huge power of social networking sites in escalating online traffic. Utilization of this power and promoting websites through the social networking sites was dubbed as “SEO 2.0”. We were so amazed by this burst that l decided to study this new phenomena by launching our own SEO 2.0 radar. 

Some of us here at RadarFarms are avid tennis fans and amateur players and, all of us being male, admire female beauty. Because of this combination, a couple of weeks ago, we couldn’t have helped but to create the “Tennis Beauties” radar; aggregating videos of the dozen hottest women on the WTA tour. Nothing wrong with this, we presume.

As many of you know, the US Open Tennis Tournament that is going on at Flushing Meadows in New York gave a bit of a boost to our new radar. However, then something unexpected happened. We witnessed on Wednesday September 5 a giant match between the cute, albeit unordinary looking, Serbian Jelena Jankovic and the still active tennis legend Venus Williams. While playing quite well and very hard; Jelena managed to smile, giggle, and tease Jerry Seinfeld (who was in attendance that night) and slowly, but surely, conquered the hearts of the audience in Flushing Meadows and those watching from home. The audience was witness to a spectular display of acrobatics from Jelena who, while trying to save some shots, managed to pull some splits from her bag of tricks (probably from sheer desperation more than anything else, really).

Presumably, it was a tipping point and as soon as the match was completed the male tennis fans (and maybe some females too), overwhelmed so much by the tennis diva, started Googling - trying to peek again on Jelena’s splits.  Apparently, since 5:10am PST on September 6 our humble radar happened to be on the first page of search results returned by Google for: “Jelena splits”, “Jelena Jankovic does splits” and similar search keywords.  

As a result, since then and until this morning,  we’ve experienced 150 visits via 74 keywords for “Jankovic”, boosting our traffic to its highest level since mid-February 2007.

It’s too bad that this splitomania faded away and/or Google somehow revised its ranking for this hot subject (as of this morning, Google dropped us from the top 50 search results for Jelena’s heroics).  But life goes on ..

On Friday 13^th, 2007 David Sifry, the founder and CEO of Technorati has announced on his blog the acquisition of Personal Bee, a social publishing company.

This is what he said about Personal Bee:

Personal Bee is a media collection platform that enables the each of us to curate and publish our own personal sites around topics, issues, or anything else we choose. It lets anyone (that means you) create and update collections of interesting citizen and mainstream media, publish them to a personal or public page, and start a following. I’ve been using it for a while now and let me tell you: it’s fast, it’s easy, and it’s FUN. 

Personal Bee one of the leading news and media aggregators was a very early adopter of Newsmastering approach. When they started couple years ago – it was one man moonlighting project ran by Nicholas Chim, a former Developer and a junior Venture Capitalist with MDV. The product was very interesting but way too raw. Then everything magically changed when Ted Shelton came on board and brought his vision and early seed money.

That’s how Ted, a Silicon Valley veteran, describes the early Personal Bee days and him getting familiarized with the Nicholas’s idea: 

Nicholas Chim then an associate with MDV in Menlo Park, started work on what we now call “The Personal Bee” early in 2005. His goal was to create a tool for himself, to help him sort through vast quantities of information that MDV partners wanted him to track on a wide variety of technology topics. He set up an account for me in May of 2005, but I didn’t do much with the Bee at that time as I was busy with my job at Orb. But when that came to an end in August of last year, I stopped by to see Nick and chat about his idea. I immediately saw something quite a bit different in Nick’s product from his original vision of a reader’s tool for aggregating and sorting through news. While the Bee could serve that need as well, I saw a set of tools that would automate the hardest part of the tasks that I had encountered in creating IP Inferno and a platform that would allow anyone to painlessly publish a vertical news portal on a narrow topic of their choosing. I saw the beginning of an ecosystem between readers, editors, and writers…

The Personal Bee in a very short time became perhaps most user friendly Newsmastering portal (curiously enough they never used this definition in their blogs/content). Good for them! 

We are genuinely happy that this acquisition, the very first one by Technorati, validates in a way this approach to Information delivery, personalization and publishing. This deal in addition to public release of Yahoo! Pipes just emphasizes that Newsmastering slow but surely became mainstream.  

We don’t know whether Personal Bee will stays ”as is” now or will be transformed into Technorati Conversational Marketing System but it would be interesting to see how the things will unfold. 

And we weren’t a Newsmastering portal, if we wouldn’t create a Radar tracking this acquisition’s buzz on the Web. 

RadarFarms is ran by IT Dynamo Associates, a Toronto-based company. However, mighty Google begs to differ

We noticed something fishy when the Australian traffic exceeded the Canadian traffic on a regular basis. Assuming the roughly equal Internet penetration level amongst residents of these cousin countries, Canada has 31.6 mln of people while Australia has just 20.6 mln.

In addition, being Canadians we have a half dozen of News Radars dedicated exclusively to the Canadian matters.

We were scratching our heads, but then, while watching HitTail, we finally figured out why we are so favoured by Australians.

You know why? Google considers us being an Australian company. Therefore, when Australians choose search through local pages, we get an unfair advantage:

The same search for Google.com.au using Search the Web checkbox ranks our Gillette Fusion radar as #95 for the very same search “gillette fusion blade distributors“.

The reason why Google treats us as Australians is probably because our site is hosted by Webstrike Solutions, an Aspendale, Victoria-based company. While they serve us from their server farms located in New Jersey, nevertheless Google considers us being Australians.

As a result, as of March 12, Alexa ranked us as 31,985 in Australia while we were just 46,896 in Canada and 103,054 in the USA. According to Alexa, 9.5% of our traffic came from Aussies.

These stats are pretty much consistent with our Google Analytics stats for the last 3.5 months, where the Australian traffic was 12.6% from the site’s total traffic.

If the things will keep unfolding the same way, we’ll soon have no choice but start putting a shrimp on the barbie.