A lot of companies are looking for ways to use social networks to find the talent they need. An interesting example comes from oDesk, an online marketplace that connects freelancers with buyers (mainly small businesses) who are looking for their services.

According to Inside Facebook, oDesk recently started using Facebook Connect API to allow freelancers to link their oDesk profile into Facebook. From there, friends and colleagues will be able to see what kind of work they do, what they charge, how they’re rated on oDesk, etc. It’s an idea that makes a lot of sense. Freelancers often find work through their personal networks. This feature gives freelancers a greater ability to tap into those networks online.

As Facebook Connect grows in popularity (and functionality) we expect that more companies will find similar uses for it. After all, there are a lot of people on Facebook.

More to the Facebook click fraud story that we wrote about earlier this week has surfaced on TechCrunch.

When the first story broke, many people were wondering why Facebook would have such an issue- unlike the Google Adsense program, which shares revenue with a network of publishers who have great incentives to click their own ads, Facebook ads are only on Facebook. However, it now appears that a financial incentive does exist, it is just a bit more indirect.

Much of the fraud, it seems, is being perpetrated by advertisers against their competitors. Nefarious advertisers are using software to generate fraudulent clicks on competitor’s ads using large sets of falsified Facebook accounts. The idea is to reduce the level of competition by driving up the costs, reducing ROI, and causing some advertisers to pull their ads. This is not entirely surprising given that a large portion of Facebook’s ads are purchased by affiliate marketers, a group that has long sported a dark underbelly.

Facebook says that the fraud is back under control. While they are employing a variety of techniques to detect and filter fraudulent clicks, they are not cancelling the fake accounts, since that would only result in the creation of new accounts and give rise to new techniques. Advertisers who have been affected should be issued credits automatically. Of course, some advertisers report that they are still having problems, which means that Facebook still has some work to do. Though discrepencies will always exist between ad clicks and site visits (for a variety of reasons), we are glad to see that Facebook is taking this issue seriously.

While Comscore and others have been talking about the bump in search traffic that Microsoft is getting from the launch of the Bing search engine, we have yet to hear much about it’s advertising performance. The format of the search results pages on Bing introduce some new elements and features which might lead more users away from ads.

Fortunately, that does not appear to be the case. The Search Agents blog reports that since the switch to Bing they have seen the following changes across a cross-section of Microsoft adCenter client accounts:

Click Through Rate (CTR) up 15%

Conversions up 6%

Conversion rate up 18%

Cost per Acquisition (CPA) down 3%

They attibute these improvements to more selective and relevant ad placement on the new engine. They note that impressions have decreased overall, but the improvement in CTR and conversion seems to compensate for that. All of these findings are very early, and most of them are based on limited (rather than global) datasets, but frankly we’re encouraged about the prospects for advertising on Bing.

TechCrunch writes today that Facebook advertisers are seeing wide-spread issues with click-fraud. Some advertisers have been airing their complaints on online forums as well as trying to resolve the issue directly with Facebook. While the article states that Facebook has yet to resolve the issue, the exposure on TechCrunch seems to have kicked the response team into high gear. A representative from Facebook is quoted in an update as saying that they have a click-fraud monitoring system in place to detect and filter out fraudulent traffic. However, they have “seen an increase in suspicious clicks” over the past few days. The rep goes on to say that they have “identified a solution which we have already begun to implement and expect will be completely rolled out by the end of today. In addition, we are identifying impacted accounts and will ensure that advertisers are credited appropriately.”

Click fraud can have serious consequences, both for advertisers and the companies they advertise with. Beyond wasting advertiser’s money (and unjustly enriching the ad provider), click-fraud can destroy the relationship of trust that must exist for the sale of clicks to continue if it is not properly addressed. Fortunately, we have yet to work with a company in this space who would not respond to clearly cataloged evidence of click fraud or other discrepancies. Now that this issue is out in the open, we hope that Facebook will be able to provide a transparent resolution.

Which would you prefer: Watching a slightly longer than normal ad at the beginning of a video, or having three regular breaks (of 30 seconds or less) during the show? Well, if you are viewing some of the premium content on YouTube, you just might get that choice.

NewTeeVee reports that YouTube recently launched a test campaign that gives users some choices in ad type and content at the start of the video. Users can opt for either a longer pre-roll ad or the regular spots during the program. Interestingly, the pre-roll option also gives users a choice of which ad to view.

As NewTeeVee notes, Hulu has been doing something similar for some time. However, we think the YouTube trial is important because YouTube and Google are much more likely to share the results with advertisers. The data from this experiment could go a long way towards educating advertisers about what works in terms of video advertising, which is what Google needs if it ever wants YouTube to be profitable.

If you are using Google AdWords then you have probably seen their new interface. If you are like us, you probably have mixed feelings about it. While it doesn’t quite “feel” the same as the old AdWords, it has definitely improved certain aspects of campaign management. Whether we like it or not it will soon be the only available interface, so we though we would start highlighting new features within the interface that we find useful (and perhaps offering our opinion on potential improvements, in case Google is listening).

A feature that caught our attention recently is the “See Search Terms” button that now appears at the top of each ad group:

This button allows you to select one or more keywords in the ad group (or all of them) and generate a Search Query Performance report for those keywords. Instead of taking you into the reporting area to setup and then access the report, it simply appears as a pop-up overlay above the current view. This gives you instant access to critical data about the keywords in the current ad group are connecting to actual search queries (including conversion stats for each query if you have Google Conversion Tracker installed). The date range for the report is determined by the date range of the current view.

Once the report is open, you will see that Google has tried to make the data actionable by adding some new indicators and functions. Search queries in the report that are already in the ad group are given green ‘Added’ labels. Keywords that have been added as negative keywords are given a red ‘Excluded’ label. Those should only show up if the date range you use includes dates before the negative keywords were added. Another caveat there is that the excluded label is only given to keywords that match a negative keyword exactly (i.e. if you have the negative keyword ‘free’, the keyword ‘free chairs’ would not register as excluded in the report, even though it would be filtered by that negative).

After you have evaluated the list, you can use the built in ‘Add as keyword’ or ‘Add as negative keyword’ functions to add selected keywords into your ad group as appropriate. While this is handy, it may be of limited use for many advertisers. If you need to add third party tracking codes onto your keyword URLs, for example, you might prefer to use the ‘Download’ function to grab a list of potential keywords that you can upload later. The same goes for negatives, since this tool only allows you to add whole keyword phrases. Adding larger phrases as negatives is often less efficient than adding just one word that is common to many trouble phrases (i.e. you could add ‘free chairs’, ‘free blue chairs’, and ‘free brown chairs’ as negatives, or just the word ‘free’, which would filter out all three, as well as many others that haven’t shown up yet).

All in all, the placement and functionality of this feature is a welcome addition to the AdWords interface that we think will help many advertisers improve the performance of their accounts.

The New York Times ran an article yesterday about the increasing importance of measurement and data analysis in online display advertising. Titled, Put Ad on Wed. Count Clicks. Revise., the article is mainly focused on changes going on in traditional, Madison Avenue agencies. The rise of advertising exchanges (or networks) like RightMedia and DoubleClick, coupled with the increasing availability of demographic and behavioral data, is allowing media buyers to start taking advantage of the real benefits of internet advertising. All we can say is: It’s about time.

While Madison Avenue has slowly come around to online media, the rest of the world has been putting it to good use. The headline of the article has been the mantra of search marketers for at least a decade. The web makes advertising testable. Knowledge about which measage your customers prefer appears as fast as the clicks come in. With traditional marketing it might take months before the results come back. But as the NYT notes, “Online, though, advertisers get instant measurements and can make instant changes to a media plan.” Imagine that.

Not everything in the article was old-hat for internet marketers. They did bring up the relatively new consumer data aggregators BlueKai and eXelate who are quitely constructing profiles of individual consumers on the web. These firms have deals in place with major websites across the web which allow them to place cookies on those sites. By connecting the dots in the cookies, they can get a pretty good idea about your commercial interests (like if you are planning to travel, buy a new car, get a new job, etc.). They sell their data to the exchanges who use it to offer highly targeted advertising.

As long as consumers don’t revolt over privacy issues, which is a real possiblity, these techniques could be a major boon to display advertisers. The nice thing about search advertising is that consumers are telling advertisers what they want with their search query. No sneaky cookies necessary. Still, consumers may choose to give up a little privacy in exchange for more relevant ads. Madison Avenue sure hopes so.

The internet is one of the best places to find passive candidates. The trouble is, the internet is a very big place and the majority of the people out there browsing aren’t interested or qualified for the positions you have open. Yahoo’s new Smart Ads offering is meant to help solve that problem.

Smart Ads use Yahoo’s behavioral targeting capabilities to identify qualified candidates and then put your ad, dynamically generated using your current positions, in front of them. Smart Ads run on Yahoo properties, which covers a lot of territory. They also gather information from across all Yahoo properties to make targeting decisions. In the example Yahoo gives, a user has done searches for things like, “San Jose weather”, and, “sales manager salary”. The user has also filled in a profile which includes their current position as a sales rep. Based on this info, Yahoo infers that this person is a passive job seeker who might be interested in sales manager positions in the San Jose area. They then serve an ad for Verizon’s sales positions in the area. Here’s the info-graphic summary for you visual-learners:

According to a recent post by NAS Recruitment Communications, the answer is yes. The post quotes NAS Strategist Caroline Slomski, who works on their client’s PPC campaigns as saying, “Our clients seeking skilled tradespersons are pleasantly surprised by how effectively SEM can help them reach their hiring goals.” She goes on to say that click through rates on ads for jobs like welders and electricians are often higher than the average of 1% to 2%.

NAS cites the expanding use of the internet across all segments of American society as evidence that skilled tradespeople such as welders and electricians are as likely as IT professionals to be looking for work online. This finding jives with what we heard at the Detroit Jobs Expo last week, where we spoke to a laid-off autoworker who told us that he found his last two jobs online.

While we would like to see some deeper metrics such as application rates or cost per applicant, the report is certainly encouraging and sheds light on a great opportunity. Since few employers in the manufacturing space have realized that PPC advertising can be effective, the costs are even lower than they are in other sectors.

If you’d like to take advantage of that, just drop us a line.