Google Checkout is putting Earthday Promotions on their checkout pages between 4/20 and 4/30.
They can purchase a “Wind Power Card” to support clean energy. Google says it will happen after the entire checkout process is finished.

A much cleaner interface for Adwords Campaign Summary showed up tonight. Cross channel on the bottom, and Adwords campaigns on top. Tidy!

Effective June 1st, Microsoft’s List Builder, which has had a steadily degrading level of service, will end and they will migrate services to Constant Contact.  The biggest change for most customers is going to be in the pocketbook. Listbuilder used to deliver 10,000 emails for around $30/month.  Constant Contact charges $75/month for the same services even if you don’t use them.Â

Migrate Listbuilder to Vertical Response

I’m a Vertical Response partner because I think it’s a better system…. and so, yes, I recommend Vertical Response as a replacement for bCentral List Builder. If you’re an occasional emailer, or you want to include postcard mailings, they have a very good (99.5%) delivery rate which is the most important factor in email marketing. Emails can be sent through their state of the art system for as little as .0075/email, making it the same price as CC for up to 10k emails. Special pricing is available for larger mailers and non-profits.

Migrating Listbuilder to Vertical Response … I am giving out 1000 free credits to Listbuilder customers, and free basic migration service. Learn more.

Changes in Googles Adwords algorithm have had a major impact in the ability to use this tool for affordable testing of highly focused landing pages. There is a correlation in my experience between volume of content and cost of bids. So “pure” landing page design “labs” have really become a challenge of late. What was once the perfect method for refining messages is now subject to the penalization of Google’s Quality Score and rapidly increasing minimum bids. It used to be that Yahoo! was available for such testing, but not anymore. The old fall-back behaves similarly on “pure” landing pages.

So is there a way to accomplish tight testing with Adwords without distracting customers from the “eyepath” and call-to-action? The risk is that we’ll lose leads as customers move away from our page into other content. What was initially a plea for information (and thus a lead) has become a skimming reader and no lead. We were able to provide information as a reward using a CRM tool and being a sales process rather than just posting it all on the landing page.

But now, these pages are going to have to become micro-sites, contining sufficient content to bring down the bids while retaining enough interest to acquire the all-important customer information. Micro-niche marketing is not getting easier, nor is testing via PPC engines.

This is just another good reason to design the sites properly from the beginning rather than trying to produce too many corrective actions via sub-designs.

“There was a great disturbance in the force” ….

A lot of new artists and indie music got silenced today by the new royalties.

Hat tip to Michael J, who showed me that Los Angeles-based 89.9 KCRW’s free streaming has gone silent and General Manager Ruth Seymour has just posted the station will now have to pay fees for every listener and have stopped their free streaming, causing bar charts to go erily flat.Â

And this is not just ANY web radio station - this is KCRW, which streams 1.6 million streaming hours per month via Real Networks, AOL Radio, Shoutcast, Windows Media and iTunes. In January, 2007, nearly 1M KCRW podcasts were downloaded and 470k connections were made to its streaming audio service.Â

For more information, please visit:

- SaveTheStreams.org (created by Radio and Internet Newsletter)

- Anxious Times for Net Radio, The Wall Street Journal, March 12, 2007

- Webcasters Find Congressional Allies Over CRB Ruling at Hearing, Radio and Internet Newsletter, March 8, 2007

- Ruling Could Hit Internet Radio’s Stop Button (audio), Marketplace, March 7, 2007

- Fee Ruling May Imperil Internet Radio, The Los Angeles Times, March 7, 2007

- Webcast Royalty Rate Decision Announced, Radio and Internet Newsletter, March 2, 2007

This was one of those days when you crank hard the entire day and before you know it, it’s 6:00 and you start trying to figure out where the time went.

Well some things did happen today worth mentioning. Ask Jeeves fired up its pay-per-click site this afternoon.

I learned that if you advertise on Miva and Yahoo! Search Marketing together, your Miva listings will get near zero clicks b/c the affiliates won’t list a given site twice - and Miva has large overlap with the others. Mystery solved on why my entire Miva campaign went through ZERO clicks this weekend… Yahoo! SM was sucking them up!

I also wrote some javascript to help with landing page tracking - filling in a referrer and landing page for lead forms for my client. My tracking URLs give me what I want, but this way the leads they get have a little bit of “history” themselves. Who knows, we may be able to target lead packages based on their last few pages viewed.

Working through custom reports on Webtrends. I’m fine with creating them, but getting them to show properly for all users has proven a pain.

Well, finally - my blog looks like the rest of my site!