expertSEM

This may be somewhat old news, but I believe it is still quite important and warrants mention on expertSEM. In October 2009, the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) updated their guidelines for testimonial announcements, bloggers and celebrity endorsements. These guidelines have not been updated since 1980, well before social media was even an inkling. Mary Engle of the FTC in a video statement on the FTC site: “We’re applying [the 1980] principles to today’s world—in the world of social media—where you can’t always recognize an advertisement just by looking at it.” To be clear, these guidelines are not laws themselves. The guides simply serve as a way to help advertisers comply with the FTC Act.

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You may have noticed some additional placements in the Google Sponsored Results recently, particularly when doing a retail type search. Below is a screenshot of an exclusive beta offering by Google called Product Listing Ads. It is a CPA (Cost per Acquisition / Action) model, and it pulls from listings in the Google Merchant Center (Google Base/Google Product Search) so only clients with product listings will be eligible to participate in the beta if it opens up.

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While Google does offer the most transparency of the major search engines in terms of reporting available in the interface, a recent Inside AdWords post admitted that sometimes the custom reporting remains cumbersome. And the good news is that they’re working on making it more readily available.

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