Got the feeling that your marketing attempts are not bearing results? Microsoft adCenter is doing a webcast which may assist you in developing adds that attract the audience you are looking for. The session is said to be power packed with “ real-world examples of successful advertising campaigns that have benefitted from the powerful demographic-targeting capabilities.” The timings of the webcast will be 8:30am pacific time (US & Canada) on Wednesday, January 17, 2007. The duration will be limited to one hour. It would be presented by Laura Galante, the Media Specialist, Microsoft Corporation, and Kevin McCabe, the Marketing Manager, Microsoft Corporation.

MIVA Inc, a search marketing company has entered into a two-year ad deal with Google. MIVA will use its websearch and AdSense services exclusively for approved web sites and applications. However, financial details of the deal is not divulged by the companies.

The search marketing company has signed the recent deal after terminating an earlier advertising deal with Yahoo!. It has decided to use Google's search and ad services to the approved sites from its MIVA Direct Inc. subsidiary.

Li Ge, a graduate student of the University of Louisville has bagged a grant of $149,923 to boost his research work on data mining and click-fraud detection. The National Science Foundation(NSF) has awarded the grant to Li Ge.

Li Ge has been working on his project 'Collaborative Click Fraud Detection and Prevention System' since May 2005. The primary objective of this project is develop a new model to track actual, real-time user behavior in efforts to detect fraudulent clicks. The NSF research grant will cover his research expenses through December 2007.

Yahoo! has been inviting U.S. advertisers to upgrade their accounts to the redesigned Sponsored Search platform. These invitations will continue over remaining of this year through early next year. However, if you wish to upgrade to the new platform early, then you can still submit your request. The request form can be filled here

A post at Official Google Webmaster Central Blog informs that Google has updated their third party program and websites information.

The tools has various options that help to generate a Sitemap easily. These include Programs/Code Snippets, Content Management Systems and Other Plugins, Downloadable Tools, Online Generators.

Click here to subscribe to our RSS feed to get a daily digest of news around search engine industry. PageTraffic SEO Blog is updated four times a day and is ranked as one of the best search engine resources blog by Pandia!

Google has made some minor changes to its AdWords CPC pricing following complaints of automatic keyword drops into the "inactive keywords" bucket. Google has rounded many of the minimum CPC amounts in order to refrain them from appearing as rather odd amounts. This is a very small change no doubt, but it's sure to give some relief to the advertisers who are now complaining of reeping less traffic.

It has been reported that Google is testing ads on Google Mobile in the U.S., U.K. and in Germany. The company began testing in Japan
earlier this year. These ads, like the AdWords Ads are priced on basis of auction. "As with standard text ads, each advertiser determines
the cost of their own mobile ad campaign."

According to a latest Mediapost report, Microsoft has incorporated behavioral targeting features into the adCenter,
it's paid search program.With this new service advertisers will now be able to show their pay-per-click ads to the potential purchasers. In order to stand apart from Yahoo's Search Marketing product as well as Google's AdWords product, Microsoft has reportedly broken down Internet surfers into 18 audience segments. These audience segments include movie watchers, mobile users, gamers, Internet power users, parents, new/expecting moms, travel searchers, auto buyers and so on.

It has been reported that Google AdSense Competitive Ad Filters does not seem to be working 100% of the time. Many AdSense publishers have been complaining about this in a WebmasterWorld thread. The competitive URLs that were blocked for some time are starting to show back up on the site. To read the forum discussions click here .

WebmasterWorld has reported that presently Google's ad diagnostic tool will not be functioning properly in all cases. In some cases when you search for ads with a few specific keywords, the diagnostic tool reports that there are no ads matching those search terms. Whereas the stats for last month as well as this month stated differently.