First:

Your starting annual base salary will be at the rate of one million dollars ($1,000,000) per annum, less applicable taxes and withholdings…You will also be eligible to receive an annual target bonus of two hundred percent (200%) of your annual Base Salary…

My reaction? $1 million–maybe 2–to take over a company that is arguably in the sorriest state of its entire existence? I’d want at least $10 million on the table before I’d consider putting my good name alongside that mess.

Then I read:

Bartz, 60, could supplement her salary with a cash bonus up to $4 million, depending on Yahoo’s financial performance. She also is guaranteed a 2009 payment of $2.5 million in cash and $7.5 million in Yahoo stock…None of Bartz’s stock options will vest unless she can increase Yahoo’s stock price by at least 50 percent above the exercise price of her options.

All told, Bartz could earn a whopping $19 million, if she can come in and right the ship. This tells me two things.

1. The Yahoo board is smart enough to offer a package that only really rewards if Bartz excels as CEO.
2. Bartz is ultra confident that she can get Yahoo on track and its stock price back closer to $20.

Bartz may not be a big name–at least "not round these parts"–but clearly the signs are good that Yahoo’s not out for the count!

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In the United States, we have heard more murmurings of a shift away from cost per click to a more performance-oriented advertising approach. Such a move makes logical sense; paying for a conversion seems more reasonable than dishing out cash for clicks.

Advertisers could be thinking the same thing, at least in the US. Across the Atlantic, the idea of cost per action (CPA) exists more as a blade of newly sprouted grass than a deep-rooted tree. In our interview with AzoogleAds CMO Mike Sprouse, he noted gaining a foothold in Europe also involves some education for the publishers and advertisers they seek.

It’s a little bit of the classic chicken and egg question. Sprouse said by partnering initially with firms in Europe, Azoogle can work on both parts of the equation at once. One partnership connected Azoogle with AdsMarket, itself a partner of advertising giant McCann Erickson.

Europe holds appeal for a simple reason. They have ad growth to pursue, at a rate that is moving faster than the US market.

A weaker dollar likely makes the prospect of partnering and building Azoogle’s brand and advertiser/publisher base in the Euro area a compelling prospect. Sprouse said the CPA model is “poised for growth across Europe.” If Azoogle can convince its targeted customers of the joys of performance marketing, they might enjoy a portion of that growth as well.

Apparently, the staff in Yaho’s European division have been told to get their act together else the branch will shut down by 2008 Quarter 1. Yahoo! has already said that it might take up "strategic options", which includes a possible sale, for Kelkoo, the comparison shopping service it bought three years ago.

Toby Coppel, the new head Yahoo’s European business said, "If you make the content more relevant, people will come. If you make a great product, they will come." Mr Coppel said Yahoo’s problems in Europe stemmed from a historical lack of focus on the region. He admits, for example, that Yahoo has not always used its most advanced technology in Europe. "In rushing out to market, we built a lot of applications that didn’t speak to each other," he said. "We didn’t have the same resources. We were managing a larger number of legacy products with fewer people than in the States."

Yahoo’s sites across Europe include services such as greeting cards, horoscopes, and property, car and holiday listings.

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Why wouldn’t Microsoft take a stake in a fast-growing social network?

• 1. It gets to keep Google out, so that’s good.
• 2. It gets to serve ads to those millions of devoted users who check their Facebook every five minutes.
• 3. It has effectively bought a call option on the future of the company.

It’s not like Microsoft has to come up with the $15-billion. All it has to do is structure a deal that is worth $250-million or so, complete with performance clauses and so forth, and it gets a piece of something that could be worth substantially more at some point (nice to see that Jon Fine of BusinessWeek agrees with me). Not to hype the Google comparison, since they are completely different animals, but wouldn’t you have bought a small percentage of Google if you had had the chance, regardless of the implied valuation?

Anyway, the bottom line is that it’s only a 1.6-per-cent stake. And it looks like this face really is worth $15-billion after all. So anyone want to take bets on how long it will be until Mark Zuckerberg decides to buy a jumbo-jet party plane just like the Google boys? I guess it’s a good thing Mark turned down Yahoo’s $1-billion takeover last year.

Further reading:

– Mike Arrington has been live-blogging the conference call.

– Silicon Alley Insider did too, by way of writer Peter Kafka.

– Some analysis from Ashkan Karbasfrooshan at WatchMojo.

– John Paczkowski at All Things D leads with the Ballmer quote about Facebook being, well… no big deal.

– Rafat at PaidContent says there’s still room for others to invest.

– Erick Schonfeld says Facebook took the path of least resistance.

– Rob Enderle tells the NYT “this was almost personal.”

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The Spartan Internet Political Performance (SIPP) Index employs 650 quantitative factors focused on finding out the level of interest a candidate is generating online. Each factor comes from numeric values on the Internet such as social network outreach, Web site traffic, blog presence and search engine utilization. The score for each candidate indicates their overall ability to reach people online and connect on issues.

"This can be compared to counting the number of digital yard signs and bumper stickers posted for each candidate on the Web," said Ryan Vartoogian, President of Spartan Internet Consulting.

The index was created because of the growing influence of the Internet in the political process. According to a July study from iCrossing.com, 42 percent of voters will turn to the Internet for information on the 2008 presidential candidates.

"In the 2008 presidential election and beyond, the Internet will play a dramatic role in shaping the decision support mechanism for voters," said Vartoogian

Weekly updates of the index will be published every Thursday online, with charts comparing the position of each candidate.

On the positive side, broad matching means that ads will run for variations of your keywords without the need to specify what all these variations might be. So in the example given in the adwords help file, the keyword web hosting might trigger ads for the search phrases web host or web hosting company.

However broad matching incorporates expanded matching so not only will ads show for variations in word order, and queries with additional words to the keywords, but ads will potentially show for synonyms and other related variations.

This might not be what you want and there may be times when the expanded matching can be much broader than you might expect. In a campaign I recently set up, a broad match on a generic product name triggered ads for search queries for a manufacturer name, very specific model numbers (not relevant to my client) and other products sold by the manufacturer.

There are two main ways to deal with it.

1. Build up a list of negative keywords and add them to the campaign

• use the keyword tools (particularly the adwords keyword tool as this will indicate potential expanded matches); extract the words that are not relevant and including them as negatives in the campaign
• run searches and seeing which words and phrases come up in the search listings and ads to uncover potential negatives
• analyse your website logs to extract non-relevant search queries or words that can be input as negatives
• run the new search query performance report to see which search queries triggered ads and what negatives are necessary in the campaign

2. Opt out of expanded match by using phrase and exact matching

By doing this you know when the ads will be triggered and you eliminate the instances of unwanted expanded matching.

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However, at Marketing Pilgrim, Jeremy Luebke informs that Google will officially release the ‘Placement Performance’ report for all its AdWords advertisers as of today.

The press release said:

“In an ongoing effort to provide more transparency to advertisers, Google announced today the availability of a new AdWords report, called a Placement Performance report, which enables advertisers to see the exact sites on the Google content network where their ads appear. Placement Performance reports also provide site-by-site performance metrics – including domain, URL, impression, click, conversion and cost data – as well as aggregated metrics for traffic generated from AdSense for domain sites. With these reports, advertisers have much more visibility into their contextually targeted advertising spend and are able to leverage the information to more effectively optimize their campaigns and meet their objectives. Designed in response to advertisers’ requests, Placement Performance reports offer advertisers both increased transparency and greater control over their contextual advertising, which ultimately leads to more relevant ads for users.”

Simultaneously, if your site has high PPC terms you can anticipate high returns as and when advertisers "you as a good source of traffic".

Google AdWords’ writes, “Now with the Placement Performance report, you can gain greater transparency about your campaigns’ performance on the content network for the first time. This report is intended as a tool for you to make informed decisions on improving your campaign’s return on investment.”

To create a Placement Performance report, follow simple instructions given in the AdWords help center.

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“Lee understands that, at this point in Google China’s progress, Schmidt is concerned about ‘nothing but’ the growing head count,” reports Caijing.com.  “Then follows his second-year question about how much we’ve achieved in R&D development,’ Lee said.  ‘Data on Web page hits is after that.  And probably in our fourth year, we need to talk about our earnings.”

In the meantime, Schmidt was quoted as saying that he’s ninety-five percent satisfied with Google’s employees in China.  Never mind Baidu’s comparatively huge market share, or several embarrassing incidents (four of which Caijing.com outlines); “China is a nation with 5,000-year history.  That could indicate the duration for our patience,” Schmidt maintained.

Still, there are some indications that the CEO isn’t willing to wait forever.  Despite being “very proud of what Kai-fu has done,” he stated, “Google.cn will continue to get better and better – and more quickly.”  Put a little stress on the “more quickly” part of that sentence, and it becomes hard to believe that Schmidt will stand by Lee for too long if this improvement doesn’t take place.

Hat tip to Philipp Lenssen of Google Blogoscoped.

Which may not have been what the billionaire intended.  “We are disappointed, as I imagine you are, that the details of our proposal and the discussion of the merits of a potential combination have become a matter of public debate,” he wrote to the Bancroft family (which owns Dow Jones).  Yet the letter was unfailingly courteous, and modesty ruled the day.

Murdoch did, however, hint at the ways in which News Corp. could help Dow Jones.  “Dow Jones is already a leader in content and digital media with three of the world’s leading paid-subscriber financial news sites,” he admitted, but, “We would enthusiastically build upon this success by leveraging the scale we have built in digital media.”

One almost wonders if Murdoch is thinking about MySpace; it and the Wall Street Journal probably don’t share many fans, and given MySpace News’s poor performance, there’s likely more potential there for harm than good.  Still, Murdoch seemed ever-mindful of not embarrassing the Bancroft family.

“Maintaining the heritage of independence and journalistic integrity of The Wall Street Journal and Dow Jones’ other publications would be of utmost importance to me and to News Corporation,” the billionaire stated.

Murdoch also addressed concerns about freedom of speech and China – though not at the same time – saying that he would “[i]ncrease funding and support for the Dow Jones Foundation to continue to promote journalism standards and press freedom around the world,” and “[e]xpand where appropriate Dow Jones’ editorial presence in emerging Asian markets, including India and China.”

Heh.  Google and Yahoo surely wish him luck with balancing those goals.

In any event, Murdoch’s “conversation” with the Bancroft family has been (to all appearances) completely one-sided.  But with a rumored $5 billion offer on the table, an acquisition doesn’t seem impossible.

It occurs to me that my accomplishments (and other entereprenuers lack thereof) are often due to basic sales savvy that is greatly lacking in many online marketing companies:  Now that more and more business is conducted online, there is a gap between supply and demand that can only be filled with a knowledge of how and why people make decisions to buy, or not to buy as the case may be.  This is the first in a ten part series:

Israel Rothman rule number one: pick a battle you can win:

When people ask us: are you web designers, web developers, SEO experts? We answer “no: that is a small part of what we do.”

These are all things that fall under the umbrella of what we do (Internet advertising), but each only plays a small part of a larger enterprize: making money online.

The first rule of any marketing campaign is to know the market, and your target customer: in our case, it is a messed up marketplace: with everybody and his brother claiming to be able to design websites and/or create placement and hits; yet most of them are what I call the “blind leading the blind”:
people who do not really know what they are talking about selling to people who do not really understand what they are buying, with no standards of pricing or performance.

For that reason, we take great care not to fit into any box that allows people to mistakenly categorize us: nobody who needs a consultant is willing to pay for one: so we sell the result of what we do (first page organic search engine placement), then do what we must to bring about that result; adding value along the way after the sale.

Since anybody else who can assure the same results with any consistency is exorbitantly expensive because of these very same problems with the market, we are positioned perfectly to offer a wanted and needed service to a starving market, packaged and delivered in a readily accepted bundling: which is the secret to my repeated success in marketing our services in a competitive marketplace.

The same methods can be applied to any business (and they are all online these days!):

1: Know the market

2: Address the problems of the market (your intended customers) with the way you position yourself in that market (address the ‘pain’ of the customers, and provide a solution)

3. Say so.

Summary:

If you make the market itself more efficient: bridge the gap between supply and demand by removing roadblocks that are inherent in the process, you will always be positioned between your client’s needs and your solution in a very effective way. Stay tooned, 2-10 in this series will follow.

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