I Am Going To Do Some Free Writing Before I Get Distracted Again

Last blog, I mentioned doing some research on real-time bidding and share it here. Well, it didn't happen and I will explain here shortly why. But before I go into discussing anything at all, I would like to thank my dear friend Ha from Missouri for having asked why there wasn't any new post on my blog. I admit I have been slacking a little bit lately, and thank you for reminding me that keeping a blog updated is just as important as having good content. Definitely easier to say than do ;-)

Back to my unfinished real-time bidding project. I put it on hold because of late, work has been giving me great learning opportunities.What I know from reading about PPC is nothing compared to actually doing and experiencing what works and what doesn't.

A great example, I used to think very simply that if a campaign was not performing well, I would make some bid changes. If things got better the week after, it meant I did my job. That is not always the case. When factoring things such as lead time (the time between when people begin their online search and actually convert - make purchases, sign up, register, etc), seasonality (fluctuation of performance between periods) or specific promotion offers, the performance of a SEM campaign becomes a different type of problem. More specifically, if the common behavior of internet shoppers for product A is to research it three weeks before actually buying it, optimize the campaign weekly might result in the under spending on keywords with high conversions just because these keywords don't seem to get any conversion at first.

Another reason is that life is full of distraction. When I was researching and contemplating on how real-time search might turn out in the next year or so, Yahoo introduced their new campaign management tool, unemployment rate was announced to be at 9.8% (this is not the latest number), the client monthly reports were due at the end of the week, or a friend kept texting about having lunch soon because she had something very important to tell, etc etc. It's like the whole world is moving at this super speed and if I spend sometimes on doing random things like blogging about real-time search, I will definitely fall behind.

I am not complaining though, be busy is always a good thing. But of everyone who is or will be reading, half of the people do not know what real time search is. Majority of the other half don't care or care about something else (like post-click, pre-click attribution or semantic search) and maybe 10% of the people will really be interested in real-time search. Actually, 15% now that Bing introduced their new Twitter index portion at www.bing.com/twitter ;-)

For the 15% who cares:
- Real-time search will definitely make contextual targeting more interesting
- News websites should watch out for a new type of competition if they aren't able to deliver in such real-time manner.
- What about segmented real-time search? Organized real-time info.


Have a joyful week!