Original post by Find Free Articles – ArticlesBase and software by Elliott Back

Microsoft and Yahoo! have been notified that Australian and Canadian authorities have separately concluded their reviews and have no objections to our proposed search agreement.

The two companies also said that their deal will pave the way for a more competitive marketplace for the benefit of consumers, advertisers, publishers, and hope that the deal will be closed by 2010.

The deal did not find any problem passing through the scrutiny of the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission since Microsoft and Yahoo already have an existing partnership in Australia. In fact, the ACCC opined that the deal would make both Microsoft and Yahoo a worthy competitor to Google.

Meanwhile, the Canadian Competition Bureau has also finished reviewing the search ad deal although they have not yet issued any public statement approving it.

With that, the deal now awaits the approval of both the European and American anti-trust bodies, which in the opinion of many analysts will give Microsoft and Yahoo a hard time.

The original article can be reached here.

Bid – Bid refers to the amount that advertiser is willing to pay for each click. It is the price you tell AdWords you are willing to pay for clicks on your ads.

Click (Click through) – Occurs when a user sees your ad and clicks on the title of your ad, leading them to your website.

Click Fraud – Click Fraud involves sending fraudulent clicks to PPC ads. These clicks can be generated by program automatically or made by manually. The intent of the fraud may be to raise money for the ad space, or to financially hurt the advertiser.

Conversion – The number of clicks that result in the visitor taking the desired action. These desired action may be purchasing, registration, or subscription.

Cost Per Click (CPC) – Amount that the advertisers is willing to pay per click on the advertisement.

Click Through Rate (CTR) – The number of clicks divided by the number of impressions a specific keyword or ad received.

The CTR % calculation is as follows
Number of ad clicks / number of impressions x 100

Impressions – The number of times an ad is displayed on Google or on sites or products in the Google Network.

Landing Page – A web page where customers will arrive when they click your ad.

Max Bid – The highest amount that an advertiser is willing to pay for each click.

Pay Per Click (PPC) – Advertisers only pay when their advertisement is clicked.

Quality Score – It is to measure the quality of your keyword and ad. Quality Score is calculated by click through rate of keyword, relevance of your ad text and landing page, historical keyword performance, and other factors. The higher the Quality Score, the lower the price you’ll pay per click.

Return on Investment (ROI) – The amount of money made when compared to the amount spent for a specific advertising model. It is the ratio of the cost of advertising relative to the profit generated from conversions such as sales or leads.

The ROI % calculation is as follows
(Revenue – Cost) / Cost x 100

While the status of that lawsuit is unknown, it is now official: Google has entered the lead gen business.

Last Thursday, Google announced the launch of AdWords Comparison Ads:

Today we’re excited to begin testing a new feature of AdWords called AdWords Comparison Ads, which lets users compare multiple, relevant offers more easily. Comparison Ads is part of our continuing effort to make ads more relevant and useful to our users and to help you, our advertisers, reach the people who are most interested in your products and services.

Comparison Ads’ first market: mortgages. For select searches, Google is now displaying an ad unit that invites users to compare mortgage rates offered by competing providers. Users can also access the comparison service directly via http://www.google.com/comparisonads/mortgages.

The comparison service allows users to view actual mortgage rates being offered by various providers based on criteria such as home price, credit rating, location and down payment. If interested in a specific provider, users can call a toll-free number provided by Google to reach the provider, or they can fill out a form to receive a call from the provider. Google anonymizes users’ phone numbers in an effort to protect their privacy. Google charges providers on a cost-per-lead basis when a user calls the toll-free number or requests a call back.

Right now, Comparison Ads is available in select parts of the U.S. and to select providers. Google says that coverage and participation will increase over time. Google also tentatively plans to go beyond mortgages into other markets. Google’s Nick Fox told Danny Sullivan of Search Engine Land:

We don’t have anything to announce in terms of the future areas this will expand in. We’ll learn from the mortgages experiment, how well it is working, where it is working and based on that, we’ll have a better sense of other places to expand the product to.

Make no doubt about it: Google’s move into the lead gen space is a big deal. And if Google succeeds with mortgages and expands into other lucrative lead gen verticals, watch out. As written wrote in a post about this subject:

In the mortgage space, many of Google’s advertisers are themselves middlemen in the business of generating leads. If Google disintermediates their market by building an online loan marketplace of its own, Google would be competing head on with its own customers. Maybe this would prove to be worthwhile, but it could also backfire.

In theory, Google could ‘usurp’ its SERPs to drive massive amounts of traffic to its lead gen services. Massive amounts of traffic that other lead gen businesses currently pay Google significant amounts of money for on a cost-per-click basis via AdWords. In the mortgage space, Google is essentially already competing with its own advertisers and while there’s enough money in the lead gen space to keep a lot of people fat, I’m sure there’s a lot of concern about just how much of the market Google might be able to disintermediate if it really wants to.

Beyond the immediate impact to advertisers, there are a lot of additional implications that could evolve out of Google’s entry into the lead gen business. Two that spring to mind are:

* Greater potential of regulatory scrutiny. It’s not hard see some similarities between how Microsoft took advantage of its OS monopoly to take over and dominate the market for web browsers and what Google could conceivably do with lead gen. After all, if Google uses its dominant search position to steer users to services its owns, someone will eventually make the argument that it’s abusing its dominant position too.

* The possibility that Google’s relationship with consumers will change. Providing a search engine and running a lead gen business are two very different things and Google’s relationship with consumers could very well change as it goes from referring consumers to relevant websites to directly connecting consumers to businesses. On the surface the distinction may be subtle but selling advertising and selling leads entail a very different consumer relationship and Google’s trust is potentially on the line.

Fasten your seatbelts. If Google succeeds with Comparison Ads, this could get real interesting real fast.

Article’s source is here.