Microsoft loosing their market share and new strategy ..

It is very unusual message I got today. i.e, Microsoft is paying back to their customers who use the search engine. This is not for all the people who use Live Search. Only people who do the searches and complete the transaction. How this work is
Consumers who do comparison shopping online through Live search and do the transaction, they can get rebate from the Microsoft, coz they have pay per action agreement with vendor and that money will give as rebate to customer who did the purchase.
This is not good news to search marketers, they cant earn anything. But if this strategy will work, they can focus on live search too. And searching buys, window shopping may not benefit from this
Why Microsoft decide to implement this typle of plan? According to them…..
"simplifying the tasks and rewarding the consumers and advertisers for their engagement in a major way.". aid Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates
Compared to last year they have lost their market share in search engine, that why they wanted people use Live search and get the experience and need advertisers to move from google to live search.
Here is full story
Microsoft Pays Public to Use Its Search Engine

Growing PPC cost

This year, starting end of last year. PPC (pay per click) cost is going up day by day in all search engines. It is big headache to us too, managing ROI through PPC is highly challenging job now. Need visitors at good conversion rate. but to get volumes and conversion, we have to stay at premium positions on all search engines, Google, MSN, Yahoo mainly. But to be there we have to spend more than $ 10 per some good keywords, but it may not maintain healthy ROI. This is current issue most of online marketers face now and we have done several strategies to overcome this. adding negative key words was very basic practice we did two years ago and still some best experts talk about it. today i read one article about improving conversion through negative key words on PPC campaigns and was happy, we also smart enough that we practices it at beginning of PPC campaigns

here is the article

Predictive Analytics

Relatively new word to me, web analytics was more familiar. But with data mining, this not very much new. I thought to have note about Predictive Analytics, Coz Data mining is one of my job area these days.

Predictive analytics encompasses a variety of techniques from statistics and data mining that analyze current and historical data to make predictions about future events. Such predictions rarely take the form of absolute statements, and are more likely to be expressed as values that correspond to the odds of a particular event or behavior taking place in the future.

In business, predictive models exploit patterns found in historical and transactional data to identify risks and opportunities. Models capture relationships among many factors to allow assessment of risk or potential associated with a particular set of conditions, guiding decision making for candidate transactions.

From Wikipedia

This is a one branch of data mining. By using historical data , we can predict the future probabilities and trends. Predictive models are used in many areas like marketing, security, genetics, and meteorology.

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How Predictive Analytics use in Marketing

Due to it is my core area, would like to further search marketing decision optimization through predictive analytics.

This article shows good insight about predictive analytics models and how marketers can smartly use it to marketing application

Update with current happenings

Today, may be I am late, but thought to start today to know what's happening around us and collect all news I get everyday. I may receive lots of news and I just read and move away, when I need it again, I have to search and search. Therefore I thought to store all the news I receive and share with others