Due to a rising concern among affiliates that Froogle’s causing a drop in sales, Brittany called members of the affiliate industry to get their take.
Froogle Hurting Affiliate’s AdWords? Many people think Froogle could cause competition between AdWords customers and those in the Froogle index. Linda Buquet, owner of 5staraffiliateprograms.com said, “a lot of my affiliates do use Adwords for advertising… I know a lot of people are worried about [Froogle] affecting not only their Adwords click-through rates but also regular Google search terms.”
Linda admits that if she were an Adwords user, she would be “greatly concerned.”
I called up internet marketing consultant Linda Woods, owner of affiliategoddess.com to see what she thought about Froogle. According to Linda Woods, Froogle does create competition between Adwords and Froogle users, which makes it even more crucial that companies decide whether to market themselves or hire affiliates.
Could Froogle Ruin Affiliate Marketing? Many affiliate marketers are already using Froogle – and some have expressed their concerns for the kind of effect Froogle might have on the industry. Linda is quick to point out that affiliate marketing is constantly evolving.
“Everybody’s always talking about affiliate marketing being ruined,” she says. “What happens is affiliate marketing continues to grow, morph, and change…” Even though pay-per-click has an effect on affiliate marketing, she believes the industry will survive.
Froogle Success. Aaron Chronister of tickets4u.com has publicly expressed his support for Froogle in the WebProWorld Forums.
Aaron, who goes by achronister on WebProWorld, works for a company that sells tickets for concerts, sports, theatrical events, and more. He says his experience with Froogle has been positive, for the most part.
The only problem is that “in my industry, the prices change so often I have to do datafeeds three times per day.” Luckily, Aaron came up with a solution to this problem: his programmer wrote a script that automatically submits these datafeeds to Froogle.
Aaron says he’s received a fair amount of traffic from Froogle, especially when Google had the “Shopping? Try Froogle” link on their homepage. He is also optimistic about Froogle’s future, and thinks it will start picking up speed on down the road. Overall, he says, “It’s a great resource. I use it all the time.”
If you have any thoughts about Froogle’s effects on AdWords or other forms of marketing, please visit our forum.
Inktomi Now Delivering MSN’s Primary Search Results In The US. I learned yesterday from Andy Beal, SEO expert and author of many fantastic articles that Microsoft is now exclusively serving Inktomi results.
I’ve seen no official word of the change thus far from MSN or Inktomi. If you search for a term, however, MSN Search labels the results as “Web Pages” instead of “Directory Listings.” The “directory listings” label indicated the LookSmart results, said Beal.
(Forum member ADAMWebDesign informed me that MSN Search .ca was serving LookSmart results as of 011503. I checked today and still found .ca directory results.)
Until now MSN delivered LookSmart results as their primary results and Inktomi as secondary. Microsoft announced in October that they would drop LookSmart’s directory listings.
Is MSN Search showing only Inktomi results where you live?
Kanoodle, Not Google, Bought Sprinks. I spoke recently with Lance Podell, president of Kanoodle.com’s contextual advertising division, ContextTarget. He most recently worked for Sprinks, which Google bought this past October.
Why Google Bought Sprinks. In our interview I asked Lance why he thought Google bought Sprinks. “Google got nervous because they realized the market preferred Sprinks. They bought Sprinks so they could shut the door.”
What they didn’t buy is the Sprinks concept of contextual advertising, and they sure didn’t hang onto the crew that’s going to make it happen for Kanoodle.
Read the whole post here and tell me what you think.
Garrett French + The murdok Team
Garrett French is the editor of Murdok’s eBusiness channel. You can talk to him directly at WebProWorld, the eBusiness Community Forum.
