Bing to drop Cashback Program

In 2008 I had listed some of the things I liked about Bing but today Microsoft announced it is retiring its Cashback program as of July 30, 2010.  The rebate program was originally known as Live Search Cashback.  It has over 1000 merchant members but Bing was disappointed with the number of users of the program.  “We are taking all the learning from the effort and putting it into some new programs for you and our advertisers designed to provide amazing shopping experiences for consumers and great opportunities for advertisers,” Yusef Mehdi, senior vice president of Microsoft’s online audience business group, wrote.

He states they will be releasing more details this summer.

In the meantime this seems like a positive for Google Product Search

General usage information any business should be interested in knowing:

• The Nielsen Company recently reported social media use increased 82% worldwide year over year
• FaceBook has over 400 million active users
• Twitter reports reaching over 14 million people per month
• YouTube announced last month surpassing 2 billion video views daily
• The US is the largest user of social media in the world at 142.1 million unique consumers / contributors.  The second is Japan with 46.6 million

Obviously the numbers are staggering and they will not decrease.  Often there is an inherent level of trust that aids social media endeavors versus traditional advertising. Think about the opportunities if only 1/10th of 1 % find your company in a social environment where interest and follow-ship may be easier to attain. You will not get there overnight but one major business development tip that I would have is to seriously consider where social networking may fit in your business model today and in the future.

Reclaim Privacy is an open-source browser-based privacy scanner that automatically inspects your Facebook privacy settings and denotes settings that are risky privacy-wise.  It’s a pretty cool tool especially for those who are new to Facebook and concerned about privacy and security settings amongst all the bad press lately.  It’s always good to be safe.

Google Analytics Keywords Report

The Google Analytics Keywords report is a great way to learn what people are using to find your site. You can toggle between Total, Paid or Non-Paid keywords to zero in on the terms being used and how effective they are.

A high bounce rate on a particular keyword is an indicator your content is not serving the visitor what they are expecting.  (note: if your site is a blog, a high bounce rate may be expected as often only one page or post  is being read)

By selecting paid only results, you’re able to get a good idea as to whether or not your landing pages are providing enough content for your site visitors being driven to you through your pay-per-click campaigns across the search engines.

By leveraging Google Analytics goal conversions and e-commerce reports you can further qualify the power of the keywords.