BEIJING, CHINA 20th August 2008- SinoTech Group (www.sinotechgroup.com.cn) announced today that they have signed a strategic partnership with US based Advantix Media.

Texas based, Advantix Media provides Search Marketing services to well known customers in verticals markets such as automotive, education and travel. “This is an exciting strategic partnership.” said Dr. Mathew McDougall, the Group CEO and Executive Chairman for SinoTech Group, “SinoTech will benefit by providing products and services into the US through this partnership. We will provide Advantix’s clients with access to the Asian markets and will conduct Agency Services, Search Marketing and creative services.”

“Asia is a rapidly developing online market, particularly China, so this partnership will extend our online marketing and advertising solutions offering into Asia Pacific; however, China will be the first market we will focus on and we expect to gain quick wins” continued John Phillips, co-founder and Principal.

SinoTech Group is attending the Search Engine Strategies event in San Jose, US this week. Both Dr Mathew McDougall and Laker Chen will attend the conference as well as meet with prospective partners.

Search Engine Strategies (SES) is the leading global conference & expo series that educates delegates on search engine marketing (SEM), including optimization (SEO) and advertising strategies, tactics and best practices.

Over the course of this week, this blog will track the sessions and highlight some of the speakers.

Its time for Yahoo! to launch a new product on the http://fireeagle.yahoo.net/.

Its Yahoo! Fire Eagle (Beta)
Yahoo released its Fire Eagle location-based social networking platform from beta, opening the technology to developers and the public. Fire Eagle allows users to update their various social networking profiles with information about where they are.

What is Fire Eagle?

According to Yahoo! The tool is of great use if you ( developer) Want to make your website or mobile application more relevant or responsive to a user’s location? Or maybe you’ve found a way to capture user location and want to find cool uses for this info? By doing the heavy lifting for you and connecting you to a community of geo-developers, Fire Eagle makes it easier to build location-aware services.

The Open API tool (Fire Eagle) is of great help to the developers or publishers to gain location information about the end user.
Fire Eagle and the Fire Eagle Developer APIs:

Fire Eagle is a new service designed to make it safe and easy to build and use location-aware applications and services. It’s a place where users can store and manage information about their current location that trusted apps and sites can update or access.

Fire Eagle exposes a rich set of web services that allow developers to write location-aware applications.

Update anywhere:
- Send updates from your phone
- Update from your favorite sites
- Do it automatically or manually

Choose what to share:
- You control your data
- You choose who to share with

Have fun on the web:
- Show your location on your blog
- Share it with your friends
- Discover cool stuff around you
- You choose how much to share

Fire Eagle is a mobile search application in the making and its up to the creativity of the developers to make a good use of it!

The IAB released an announcement that they have released a new benchmark study which suggests that online publishers are increasingly turning to sales intermediaries known as ad networks to sell off excess inventories. The use of “ad networks” surged from 5% of total ad impressions sold in 2006 to 30% in 2007, according to this newly released “Digital Pricing Benchmarking Study”.

The report stated that the reasons for the rapid growth in the use of ad networks is two-fold:

• Lack of adequate pricing tools and inventory management discipline contributed to the growth in available ad space. This is causing publishers to seek out ways to sell large inventories of unsold ads. Publishers often lack basic information on realized prices and inventory sold by client and channel, limiting management’s ability to make effective decisions.

• Large marketers continue to shift significant portions of their advertising budgets online and view ad networks as an effective way to achieve greater buying scale and drive down CPMs.

Another important finding of the study is that publishers who actively manage and use multiple ad networks can achieve higher revenues on display ads sold via networks. The benchmarking study finds publishers vary in their adoption of ad networks, the approaches used and the results attained but overall finds that the keys for success for online publishers are having dedicated staff, better tools and metrics that allow constant vigilance in managing ad pricing, reported sell rates and channel conflicts.

To view the complete study, please go to www.iab.net/digital_pricing_research.

There is a new policy at Yahoo! and Google about opting out of ad targeting. It appears that this policy was a direct response to Congressional scrutiny over the intrusiveness of online advertising and behavioral targeting. Yahoo and Google want to make it easy for you to opt out of their ad targeting on both their sites and across the Web. Yahoo announced a new one-click opt-out policy today, and Google made it possible to opt out of both Google and Doubleclick ad targeting with one click yesterday.

By providing a one click opt out may save both Yahoo and Google  from a more draconian Governmental directive later. Who’s going to bother to opt out of ad targeting? Some people will, but the vast majority of people probably won’t. What would really mess up Yahoo’s and Google’s advertising ROIs is if Congress mandated that ad-targeting (via cookies) be opt-in. They’d surely get even fewer people opting in for those cookies than they will now get opting out. Most people will be too lazy to do either.

But if you don’t want those cookies, you can decline Yahoo’s here and Google’s here

Beijing, China— 7th August 2008: Chinese leading interactive technology and digital marketing company SinoTech Media (www.sinotechmedia.com.cn) announced today it entered into a partnership agreement with Redgate Media, a leading integrated media and entertainment company in China. SinoTech Media will act as the sole and exclusive ad agency in China, Hong Kong and Taiwan for the sale of advertising space in the streaming radio channels operated by Redgate Media and its partners. 

Redgate Media is a one-stop shop for advertisers in China. Redgate Media reaches a nationwide audience through radio, television, outdoor display advertising, and the fixed mobile Internet.

Through this agreement, SinoTech Media gains the rights to promote and sell targeted advertising for the streaming radio channels of Redgate Media, and Redgate Media will use SinoTech Media’s leading ad serving system SinoXpress and SinoAnalytics to serve all the advertising placed under the agreement. SinoTech Media will provide advertising site representation on QQ.com, a site where Redgate Media streams live radio through a cooperation with Tencent Holdings, the operator of QQ.com.  

“There is no doubt that this partnership between SinoTech Media and Redgate Media will benefit both companies, “ said Ms. Louise Lu, the President - Radio of Redgate Media said. She continued, “SinoTech Media will help us monetize the domestic traffic but also using their technologies, the international traffic as well.  We have been very impressed with the way SinoTech Media has worked with us to date and confident we will continue to cooperate further in the future.”

Further, Dr. Mathew McDougall, Group CEO and Executive Chairman of SinoTech Group said, “I am pleased that SinoTech Media has today become the sole and exclusive ad agency for Redgate Media’s streaming radio offering. This model to integrate both radio and digital advertising into a single channel is an exciting prospect and an opportunity that has not been fully realized here in China. This deal marks a turning point in China for integrated campaigns.”

Search marketing certification in the West is well documented and supported by most search marketing organizations. However, in China the search marketing industry is still embryonic, so the need for a certification program to establish a skills level and professional competence is the first steps in promoting skills, knowledge and confidence for employers and clients.

In the past month SinoTech has validated through this certification program more than 100 people (outside the SinoTech group). The multi-choice exams are conducted online in Chinese and the exam is time limited to 30 minutes. This exam leads to a Chinese search marketing certification and the questions are specifically aimed at the search engines in China. You can read more about our certification program by visiting http://www.sinotechgroup.com.cn/certification/certification1.html

SinoTech Media (www.sinotechmedia.com.cn) announced today that they have launched a specialist youth channel, called KidsNet, for advertisers targeting young internet users.
”The KidsNet channel provides advertisers a single channel that can reach multiple youth audiences simultaneously, whilst enjoying the flexibility to target specific consumer profiles by content, geographies, and time of day; thus, delivering tailored ads,” Dr Mathew McDougall, Group CEO & Executve Chairman for SinoTech Group.

According to the company, KidsNet will reach more than seventeen million online youths across China, including Taiwan and Hong Kong.
This channel is working with a variety of platforms including social networking, entertainment, shopping, gaming and sports sites across China. KidsNet is the latest channel for SinoTech Media and complements, BizNet, ITNet and FashionNet to name a few of their other key channels.

One question that we are often asked here at SinoTech Search is how much resource and spend the advertisers and brands should devote to Search Engine Optimization (SEO) versus Search Engine Marketing (SEM). However, it seems to be one of those questions that you never get a direct answer from most Search Marketing companies.

One of the first considerations when it comes to planning integrated campaigns is that of timing. The nature of SEM makes it a very agile compared to SEO, which can be particularly important when it comes to running reactive or tactical campaigns. Getting exposure against new keyword groups will always be quicker via SEM.

While SEM may be a faster way to get onto the results pages of the Search Engines, the results and insights gained from the campaigns can and should then be used to underpin longer-term SEO strategies. Analyze the ad copy and specific keywords that delivered results through your SEM and then use those insights to inform your SEO.

On a similar note, you can consider using SEM as a way for testing keywords, the copy and landing pages before you embark on a full scale SEO campaign. Use tools to ensure that you closely monitor how you compare against your competition and, where necessary, redress any negative balances with adjustments to your campaigns. For your top keywords, and particularly in aggressive industry sectors or at key times of the year, you may even choose to run your SEM campaigns as a loss-leader until your SEO has time to catch up.

A final point to consider is that SEM also exists in the space beyond the search and meta-search engines. You can select to run SEM ads on the content networks that will reach parts of the web that SEO can’t, further extending your online reach. Of course, when it comes to running contextual SEM campaigns, you need to start thinking about how your campaigns integrate with your broader product/company branding strategy. But that’s another topic for another post.

I was reading the blog post by Tim Ash on Search Engine Watch where he talks about the handbook produced by the Marketing Sherpa’s called “Landing Page Handbook”.

Tim’s post draws on the results from the handbook exploring the average conversion rates for different marketing tactics. The survey data was drawn from over 5000 active online marketers in a variety of settings.

In-house managed PPC Search - 3.84%
Outsourced managed PPC Search - 5.40%
Difference: 40%

In-house Natural Search Optimization - 2.62%
Outsourced Natural Search Optimization - 4.76%
Difference: 80%

What this suggests is when outsourcing SEO/SEM to a specialist agency, the conversion rates are much higher. Please note that statistics are always simply a gauge, the statistics did not breakdown the results by industry or company sizes, or other critical information. However, at a high level the data makes perfect sense, since agencies must perform better to justify their fees and keep their client’s loyalty and business.

Agencies that are specialists in a particular area see a wide cross-section of accounts and industries among their clients and should be able to do a better job. This post is not intended to criticize  in-house SEO/SEM teams but make the point that the Search marketing industry is moving very fast, and unless you have a whole organization focused on keeping up with the changes, it is very difficult to stay up on the latest developments.

Marketing activities are the engine of growth for a company. They are not administrative cost centers. Many companies mistakenly try to save a little money by running their programs in-house. They do not realize the real cost is in the lost opportunities that they can not capitalize on. If your in-house program is profitable, that is not enough - you must consider the scale of your program and always question how much money you might be leaving on the table. Giant conversion rate differences such as the above can be turned into strategic weapons that let you soundly trounce your competition.

So next time you consider the in-source / outsource decision, consider the opportunity costs as well as direct costs.