Weekly Rap-up of Search Engine Industry News – 7/2 – 7/6

A summary of search related news items that occurred this week including Net Applications releases June 2007 search engine market share stats, Yahoo! launches Smart Ads for the travel industry, FeedBurner is now free thanks to the recent acquisition by Google, eBay launches new toolbar with Yahoo! functions, adCenter adds click quality reporting to its management console, and finally, Google adds metric to AdWords management console that allows advertisers to measure their share of total impressions.

Monday

• Net Applications (Hitslink) Search Engine Market Share Stats for June 2007 – The first time I can remember in a long time where Google actually lost some share (-0.18%). Not to fret as they are still at 51.53%. Yahoo! holds on to second place at 12.16%, MSN at third with 6.06%, AOL at fourth with 2.06% and poor Ask, despite the new features they recently launched maintains fifth place at 0.92%. Yahoo!, MSN and AOL actually gained while Google and Ask lost some share. Stoney deGeyter has more details at E-Marketing Performance.

• Yahoo! Launches Smart Ads – Yahoo! Search Marketing has launched a new ad product called Smart Ads. According to the Y!SM Blog, this new product enables advertisers and agencies to connect with their customers through display ads in a more tailored and relevant way. This new ad product enables advertisers and agencies to market in a customized way in real-time with highly relevant, targeted ads on Yahoo! It is a combination of traditional search ads and display ads, with some behavioral targeting thrown in. Travel will be the first industry allowed in, however additional markets will follow.

Tuesday

• FeedBurner Now Free? - Search Engine Land reports that Google has ceased to charge for the FeedBurner service. As you might recall, Google recently acquired FeedBurner for a rumored $100 million in order to give “AdWords advertisers broader distribution to an even wider audience of users.” Now the two fee-based FeedBurner services, MyBrand and Stats PRO, will be free. FeedBurner provides detailed statistics for blog feeds including subscriber numbers, item clickthrough tracking, podcast downloads and aggregate item uses amongst other features.

Wednesday

• New eBay Toolbar With Yahoo! Functionalities - From Search Engine Journal, eBay has launched a new toolbar that includes Yahoo! functionalities. New features include Improved Search – search all of the Web, eBay, eBay Express, Half.com and more; One Click Access to favorite destinations – access frequently visited sites such as Yahoo!Mail and My eBay, with just one click; Account Guard – protects both eBay and PayPal accounts; and eBay Alerts – to help users monitor bided items through notification alerts. Although a simple development in terms of eBay and Yahoo cooperation, one can’t look past the fact that this cooperation might hold a deeper underlining meaning.

Thursday

• Click Quality Reports Now Available in adCenter - adCenter now offers the ability to see whether clicks on ads are considered standard or low in quality. Standard-quality clicks are the clicks that advertisers want, that ordinarily result in conversions, and for which they are billed for. Low-quality clicks are clicks that adCenter classifies as non-billable, including those that adCenter has identified as invalid clicks, clicks that have characteristics of low or unclear commercial intent, clicks that exhibit patterns of unusual activity, clicks that originate from spiders, robots, questionable sources, or test servers and/or clicks that should be filtered out for other reasons. They further point out that some traffic that adCenter has flagged as low quality might ultimately result in conversions, which is why they chose to label them “low quality’ rather than “invalid.”

Friday

• Impression Share Metric Added To AdWords - Google has added a new metric that will allow AdWords advertisers to measure their share of impressions compared to the total sum of impressions that were actually shown for search queries related to terms they are targeting. Impression Share columns will include Impression Share (IS) – the percentage of times your ads were shown out of the total available impressions in the market you were targeting, Lost IS (Rank) – the percentage of impressions lost due to low Ad Rank (cost-per-click bid x Quality Score) and finally Lost IS (Budget) – the percentage of impressions lost due to budget constraints.