Ask.com's parent company, IAC, released their second quarter earnings statement today.

Ask.com is bundled into the "Media & Advertising" category, which overall reported higher revenue than the previous year by 33%. However, Ask.com realized a "lower revenue per query since the launch" of Ask 3D in June. Why? Because the new interface requires less clicks to find what you are looking for, said IAC. Ask.com did notice a "higher frequency and retention," they said. Find the full release here.

Note From Danny: I'm still scratching my head at that explanation. If Ask 3D is better in relevancy, it would result in fewer searches (not clicks), since people wouldn't search, not find what they are looking for and search again. But fewer searches should mean revenue per query would rise, if they're still clicking on ads at the same rate. Instead, it sounds like that relevancy has improved to the degree that fewer people are clicking on the ads. That's still a good thing in the long term -- better relevancy should mean more satisfied and long-term users

Microsoft Works to become a free, ad-funded product from ZDNet reports that the next version of the Microsoft Works office suite is to be ad funded.

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QueryCAT is a new search engine that searches Frequently Asked Question pages (FAQs) found at various web sites.

We admit it is an intriguing idea: If you search to fix a problem of a kind (let us say: How to install memory in an iMac?) or information on a site or a company (What is Google?), FAQs often have focused and clear answers.

After all, FAQs are made by web sites to answer common question, thus reducing the amount of repeated queries. Even Pandia has one.

By focusing on FAQs only, QueryCAT, reduces much of the noise that fills up regular search results.

QueryCAT does its job pretty well

Does it work? Yes, our testing indicates that it does work in most cases. A search for “ram ibook” did lead to advice on how to install more memory in these Macs.

In spite of the examples given on the QueryCAT home page, we have found that it helps to avoid natural language questions. “How to install ram in an iBook” gives no results, as it seems QueryCAT is unable to sort out the filler “stop” words (how, to, in, an etc.).

Moreover, it does not seem that QueryCAT catches synonyms. A search for “memory ibook” did not lead to any relevant listings. Still, we do not expect that from the best of search engines, and with some intelligent query formulation, this search engine should help you narrow down the relevant hits.

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Google Adwords launches a new ad performance tool called Campaign Optimizer which is an on-demand Adwords tool that suggest personalized campaign ideas for Adwords account holders.  When inside the Adwords’ Campaign Summary page, a new link is provided labeled “optimize campaign”. Upon clicking on this link, the campaign optimizer tool will analyze existing Adwords campaign to find out which settings have not been set and which settings is not working well for the current campaign. In a few minutes, the campaign optimizer tool will suggest optimization ideas which the account holder can either implement or reject. The tool provides an explanation on each of the suggestion it provides.

The Campaign Optimizer can be utilized to help improve Adwords performance through:

• Change in daily budget for more ad visibility traffic
• Adding new keywords that relate to your landing page
• Changing  keyword matching options to reach customers more effectively
• Adjusting  keyword maximum cost-per-click bid that  affects ad position
• Changing ad text that affects click-through rate

Inside Adwords also suggest that Campaign Optimizer be the first step in optimizing Adwords campaign rather than making it the last step. And that Campaign Optimizer works best for Adwords campaign that have been running for at least two weeks.

Read the detailed instruction on using the Campaign Optimizer.

We all remember from Marketing 101, that the ability to measure the effectiveness of marketing activities and calculating ROI is imperative to a company’s go-to-market strategy. While it is quite easy to measure ROI with most traditional marketing channels like print, radio and even search marketing; it’s much more difficult to measure ROI from social media marketing. In fact, just a few months ago; Comscore announced a research and development initiative that is designed to provide comprehensive measurement of conversational media such as blogs, wikis and community-driven social media sites.

Unfortunately, we all know that Comscore studies can take anywhere from 6 months to 2 years to complete; and most marketers probably don’t have that time to wait. So, here are a few things you can do today to measure the effectiveness of social media.

Standard ‘Engagement’ Metrics

In most cases, if you are leveraging social media, you are driving traffic back to your web site. Here are some general ‘engagement’ metrics that you can monitor once visitors arrive:

• Unique visitors
• Page views per visitor
• Time spent on site
• Total time spent per user
• Frequency of visits
• Depth of visit
• Conversions

You can track most of these metrics from web analytics tools like Omniture or even Google Analytics which is a free tool.

And then of course, if you have a paid search marketing campaign, you will want to monitor the standard search metrics (clicks, impressions, click through rate, conversion rates, revenue, etc.) I would also recommend SEM Director as an additional tool, if you can afford it. It basically allows you to assign values to particular actions on the web site once visitors arrive from search – both paid and organic traffic (i.e. number of page views, form submission, clicking on a particular link, an internal search, etc.)

Social Media Metrics

There are several other elements that you can look at when measuring the success (or lack thereof) of your social media marketing efforts; and of course it depends entirely on what your overall marketing goals are. Is it to push sales, drive engagement, increase awareness? Whatever your success metrics are and in addition to the above ‘engagement’ metrics; here are some others to consider as well:

• Content Consumption – if you have a blog – which you should, a good way to measure engagement is to monitor who is reading your blog, where they are coming from and what content they are reading. You can run web analytic reports that will show you the most popular content on your site and/or blog. This data will also show you how long they were on that particular page, where they came from, and also the bounce rate (percent of visitors who left your site after visiting a particular page).
• Content Contribution – assuming you have a blog/wiki and allow for comments; a quick and easy metric would be to monitor the number of visitors who are actually interacting with your content.
• Social Bookmarking – In other words, who is actually adding your site/article/blog posts to sites like Del.icio.us, Reddit, and Stumbleupon. There are a couple of methods you can leverage to look at this metric. You can use your web analytic tool and run a click map report and see how many web visitors are clicking on the social bookmarking icons. Or, you can simply create profiles in each of the bookmarking sites and search for your urls.
• Subscribing to a RSS feed – you can also measure how many of your readers are actually subscribing to your RSS feeds.
• Emailing posts – assuming you allow for your blog postings to be emailed to others, you can use your blog platform tool like (WordPress offers this functionality) to see how many emails are actually being sent through your form.
• Who is talking about you – there are a couple of different ways you can do this; and it’s not an exact science. Again, with WordPress, they have the functionality that allows you to see which other site(s) are linking to your site. It’s located right in the dashboard so once you log in, you can see it right away. You can also go to blog search engine Technorati and search your domain. Lastly, you can always use the old SEO trick by searching for your domain in Google, Yahoo and MSN with the following: link:http://www.yourwebsite.com. These numbers will never match up of course; but it serves as a good indicator to see who is talking about you (or at least linking to you and your content).
• Profile Engagement: So, you may not have a blog but perhaps you have a profile on Myspace, Facebook, or Mybloglog. You can always apply the same metrics already mentioned above; as well as monitor the number of friends that you have, total profile visits, etc. Each social networking site offers some type of vitality metric to see what’s going on in your communities.

One thing to consider before you engage with social media is to assign monetary values to your metrics, especially if your end goal is not revenue conversions. This is where the task becomes a tad bit challenging but it’s key if you want to assign an ROI to your social media marketing efforts.

Michael Brito is a Senior Marketing Manager at Yahoo! and also authors Britopian, an online marketing blog, where he writes frequently about SEO, Social Media and Integrated Marketing Strategies.

Why the real estate industry hasn’t embraced search engine marketing

The internet has become an indispensable consumer tool for researching real estate, one of the most highly charged personal purchasing decisions. Intuitively, most people would think the real estate industry would note the fact that all their clients are online doing this research… Online Marketing Blog conducted a recent poll in which its readers concluded that real estate was the #2 internet marketing savvy industry after the internet industry itself… however, the real truth is very few brokers and agents understand internet marketing beyond placing online ads for their listings. Why?

In general, real estate brokers and agents have historically always associated the internet as providers of freebie real estate data that devalue, even disintermediate their roles in the transaction. Finally accepting the internet as a fact of life, some real estate agents are beginning to understand that they can leverage the lead generation functionality that Web 2.0 interactivity provides by establishing direct dialogue with potential clients. And the internet, more specifically the search engine, is perfect for directing local leads to the agent, provided the agent has a “Google juiced” online presence to be recognized by search engines.

Blogging is the best way for an agent to build a local online presence

Real estate agents already have a name for it - “farming” - the tactic of mass marketing to a specific locale where their potential clients live. They’ve used post card mailing, open house sign-ins, and local supermarket cart ads, but they don’t realize that they can leverage search engines to attain local visibility. Remember it’s all about lead generation… agents often have huge contact databases of potential clients and will wait for years for one of them to suddenly decide to buy or sell. The search engine shortens the process… 56% of internet based leads will choose the first agent to respond to them.

The current best way for an agent to attain search engine visibility is through blogging and participating in social networks that specialize in real estate like Active Rain. At Transparent Real Estate, I’ve been advocating how effective real estate blogging builds Google page rank and traffic because local long tail searches, like “San Francisco Potrero Hill homes for sale”, are more apt to be queried by a “lead” specifically interest in that neighborhood. To rank high on localized long tail searches, most agents adopt a hyperlocal content strategy that builds local keyword content for search engine recognition.

In my next article on Search Engine Journal, I’ll explain why real estate agents have a hard time starting a blog, even when shown evidence that showing up on the Google top page is tantamount to being the next generation Yellow Pages ad.

Pat Kitano authors the Transparent Real Estate blog and is the co-Founder, Managing Principal of Domus Consulting Group, a management consulting firm working with real estate brokerages, title insurance companies and Web 2.0 companies to develop technology marketing strategies.