There is a new Keyword Diagnosis option in the Keywords tab in AdWords. This can give advertisers detailed diagnostic info for multiple keywords at a time.

"Whether you have ten keywords or ten thousand, making sure your ads are showing is a top priority," says Miles Johnson of Google’s Inside AdWords crew.

American Express has launched a new search marketing tool for small businesses via its OPEN forum. The tool, powered by Clickable, is called SearchManager, and lets business owners manage paid search campaigns across Google AdWords, Yahoo Search Marketing, Microsoft adCenter, and Facebook ads from one dashboard.

A few months ago, Google introduced AdWords Search Funnels reports. These describe click and impression behavior on Google.com that leads up to a conversion, with reports like Assisted Conversions, First and Last Click Analysis, Time Lag, and Path Length.

Facebook and Twitter get a lot of the credit for all of the conversation that is going on around the web these days, and they certainly account for a great deal of it. Still there is public conversation happening in many other channels – blogs, Q&A sites, news sites, YouTube, other social networks, and forums.

Since Bing launched last year, it has placed a great deal of emphasis on giving answers beyond just the "ten blue links." In reality, the major search engines each offer much more than these ten blue links  (the standard of the old days of search). Google, Yahoo, and Bing each offer a variety of ways for users to obtain the information they’re looking for through various search options, blended search results, and other products altogether.

It’s no secret that marketing tactics must change over time – just imagine how far a modern newspaper would get paying boys to shout "extra" on city streets – and the search marketing industry may be changing right now.  Experts discussed how, along with how marketers should react, in an SES New York session titled Search Marketing: Analyze This.

In search, a lot of what Yahoo has done has been overshadowed by what Google and Bing have done, simply because Google controls such a huge piece of the search pie, and Bing is still a relatively fresh entity. All eyes are still on Bing as it grows. That leaves Yahoo somewhere in the middle, where it technically sits in terms of market share.

How important is Yahoo to your search strategy? Let us know.

All of the search engines are rushing to incorporate more social media elements into their interfaces. Examples of this are evident in things like Google and Bing’s deals with Twitter and Facebook. You can see it in Yahoo’s new Twitter tab for news results.

This week Google released some findings from a test Google Netherlands conducted with Metrixlab, Heineken, and Heineken’s agency Twist. They set out to find what effects paid search ads had on branding, and were quite pleased with the results.

Yahoo is launching a campaign with Bank of America this week, which a spokesperson for Yahoo tells WebProNews is essentially "a big online push for BofA to build visibility and facilitate dialogue in the small business community."

Yahoo’s Small Business Answers Center is designed for small business owners with "great ideas and good questions," who don’t always get credible answers.

The phrase “attribution model” may be a bit too industry-jargonish, and for those of us who remember parcels of information left over from late-night Psych-class cramming, “attribution” means something else entirely.

This June, Google will expand advertiser’s ability to bid on trademarked keywords worldwide in over 200 countries despite a class action lawsuit filed in Texas. The plan to do so illustrates Google’s confidence that trademark bidding is not a violation of trademark laws—apparently anywhere.

Yahoo has given the Yahoo Web Analytics interface a new look and some new features. These new demographics and interest group reports, as well as new segmentation, filters, a demographics and interest groups dashboard, the ability to create more scheduled reports, and custom fields with more actions.

New reports included in the new dashboard include:

The countdown is on. Only a handful of sleeps until 2009 and of course the predictions are flowing thick and fast. The experts are gazing into their crystal balls and sharing their visions for 2009 in terms of search, social, online, mobile and marketing in general.

I’ve pulled together a list of the best predictions I’ve uncovered so far and detailed them below. (if I’ve missed any – share them via our comments, and I’ll add them in).

If you want to optimize your Google rankings, who do you hire? An SEO, right?

If you need some web development stuff done, who do you pick? A web dev firm, right?

Now, if you want to implement an online public relations campaign, who do you turn to?

Search marketing has two distinct faces. One is a purely technical side that deals with percentages and code and all things geeky. The other is the reason why you do it: to do more business via the Internet. I have seen these two sides face off and claim that the mere existence of the other makes life impossible for them. I have seen these two not communicate at all. I have also seen these two sides cooperate. In the end though, this is all behind the scenes stuff. How we look to the business world should be on everyone’s mind.
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As technology advances and the demands of customers fragment, the task of empowering resellers and distributors with effective and relevant marketing tools becomes more daunting than ever before. To solve these challenges, a handful of forward-looking companies are experimenting with emerging technologies and particularly Search‹to empower their channel partners in an attempt to make them more flexible and responsive to the changing market.

The Channel Challenge

Selling a massive piece of machinery should be as much a part of search marketing as selling a consumer good like the iPhone.

As a small business or site publisher, the route to Moneyville displays signs pointing to Google’s advertising products. In Google’s estimation, of course, but they may be correct.

After further review, Google decided to split Performics into two businesses, with the search marketing side tagged with a “For Sale” sign.

The 4th annual SEMPO State of the Search Marketing Industry survey is now open. If you work client side, agency side or independent, be sure to take this survey and make your voice heard.