Hall » SEO Vision

For the last hours of the Sage Software Insights 2008 tradeshow we of course talked to some more business partners, as well as some of other Preferred Vendors at the show. See some of our final observations before we wrap up for a very successful week!

YouTube has remained on the bleeding edge of the web video for no shortage of technical innovation and controversy. The ubiquitous video sharing portal took another leap today with its announcement of new APIs allowing developers to upload to YouTube from other sites, reskin the tube player, modify data, and pull customized feeds.

This may not impress you much if you’re not an uber-geek, but the bottom line is it allows you to do much more with video on your website. Basically, you can use YouTube’s enormous resources and infrastructures to handle all of the heavy-lifting, and then rather smoothly integrate that content throughout your site, even minimizing the fact that it’s on YouTube! If you’re trying to keep your videos private, well, maybe this isn’t really what you’re after, but if you’re like everyone else who just wants their video to be seen to boost their brand and raise awareness for their company, this is a GREAT addition to YouTube’s already robust service.

Microsoft, in its desperate scramble to get back on the online ad train, today announced the availability of the Gatineau Web Analytics program, an enhancement to the MSN AdCenter paid search platform that’s also open to webmasters in general. Like other analytics programs (*cough cough* Google *cough*) there will be information on specific visitors, clickthrough tracking, keywords , demographic/geographic information as well as analytics to help advertisers better track the success of their AdCenter campaigns.

It’s interesting and invigorating to see MS taking this market so seriously, even though they’re clearly far behind where Google, and even Yahoo, are. I must admit that I, like many other paid search managers, find the AdCenter software cumbersome and even frustrating to use. Yet, the traffic from MSN is more captive (and cheaper) than the competitors and results in strong conversions, making it a vital paid of every comprehensive paid search campaign. I look forward to using the new analytics program and hope it makes my job of keeping paid search campaigns profitable more easy… Let’s just hope they make it easy to use for people managing multiple accounts, multiple campaigns, and many, many ad groups.