According to BusinessInsider.com, Google is gearing up to launch its Groupon-killer, Offers, in New York.

After talking with merchants who have signed up to provide deals through Offers, we’ve learned that Google’s deals product provides merchants several key advantages relative to Groupon, advantages that could shake up the deals business.

We’ve also learned that at least one Google Offers salesperson in New York is promising merchants that signing up Offers will provide “SEO benefits.”

Specifically, a merchant tells us, the Google salesperson promised that merchants who sign up for the program will become “No. 1 in Google.”

Trump Says You’re Hired to Prime Visibility

I am extremely proud to share that the company I founded, Prime Visibility, a full-service digital marketing firm, announced this week that it has been retained to work with the Trump Organization on several digital marketing initiatives.

Prime Visibility was hired to design, build and market TrumpVegasCondos.com and TrumpLV.com, two websites dedicated to the Trump International Hotel Las Vegas. Prime Visibility is currently optimizing and marketing both sites, building an online presence for the property and increasing the amount of qualified leads interested in purchasing the property’s luxury condominium units. Since the project’s launch, both websites have seen a dramatic increase in search results, traffic, page one rankings, and leads.

Prime Visibility was also hired to redesign 40WallStreet.com, the website for The Trump Building, the world renowned 72-story landmark address and tallest office building in downtown New York City. Prime Visibility completely redesigned the website in addition to adding a user-friendly navigation menu and content management system.

Most recently, Prime Visibility was retained to redesign and optimize TrumpChicago.com , the website promoting condominium units available for purchase at the Trump International Hotel & Tower® Chicago, and has been working on various digital marketing projects for the Ivanka Trump luxury jewelry collection.

We are extraordinarily excited to be working with the Trump Organization; they are extremely savvy and have passionate and devoted people on their team. Working with them is very rewarding.

I will also disclose, as a domainer, that I purchased TrumpVegas.com in an auction but of course I am giving the domain to my client and it already forwards to the project we are working on….

@AndrewHazen

According to MediaPost, High-tech companies spent 26% more on paid-search advertising in 1Q, compared with the year-ago quarter, and 6.4% sequentially, according to a report that search marketing firm Covario plans to release this week.

While the year-over-year percentage might seem a little steep, it’s important to note that spending dropped nearly 15% between 4Q 2009 and first-quarter 2010. Not since 2007, however, have companies in the high-tech industry invested more in paid-search campaigns during the first quarter, compared with the fourth.

In Covario’s 2010 end-of-year analysis, the company recommended that clients increase global paid-search budgets by 15% to 20% for 2011, compared with last year’s budgets. The company suggested the necessary increase would help high-tech companies maintain market share.

Cost-per-click (CPC) increases drove two-thirds of the growth in spending during the past two quarters worldwide. Improved monetization techniques by the search engines, such as Google, as well as purchases of expensive generic search terms propelled increases.

Covario expects click-through rates, CPCs and overall spending to increase on Google this year as a result of the impact Google Instant has on transferring clicks from natural search to paid search. The company “documented a rise of between 3% and 4% of all clicks transferring to paid search, meaning advertisers need to spend more on paid search for keywords where they do rank highly on natural search in order to maintain the same levels of traffic and conversions,” according to the report. (These are the listings where clicks will be transferred to paid search.)

Globally, advertisers spent 25% more on Google in the first quarter, compared with the year-ago quarter. Spending on Yahoo rose 28%; and Bing, 3.7%. Bing’s strength in the U.S. market drove weak investments throughout APAC and EMEA in the world, according to Covario.

In conversations with clients, Covario says the rise of CPCs and CPA rates in the U.S. continues to prompt companies to look overseas for large gains in paid-search advertising returns.

When breaking out campaign budgets for paid search globally this year, the Americas will get 60%, up between 8% and 12%, compared with the prior year. The APAC region will account for 22% of budgets — up between 20% and 25%; and EMEA at 18%, up between 30% and 35%, compared with 2010.

As for the Americas, Covario expects market share for Bing and Yahoo on the combined platform to stabilize this year at between 25% and 30%.

According to MediaPost, A judge presiding over a potential class-action lawsuit by search marketers against Google has ordered the company to divulge financial metrics associated with its “parked domain” and “errors” program, which place ads on sites with no editorial content.

The data that Google must disclose concerns its assessment of the quality of sites within its AdSense network, including its parked domain and errors pages. Among other information, Google must reveal the “conversion score value of the property source” — defined in the court order as “a metric Google uses to price clicks from Web sites contained in its network.”

Also, Google must reveal the “smart pricing discount,” or the discount that Google applies to clicks on some of its AdSense properties.

U.S. District Court Magistrate Judge Howard Lloyd in San Jose, Calif. ruled that Google should share this information with the marketers that are suing. The theory is that it sheds light into Google’s pricing formula for its parked domain program.

The legal battle between the marketers and Google dates back to 2008, when several companies filed lawsuits complaining that Google shouldn’t have placed them in its AdSense for Domains and AdSense for Errors programs. Those programs often serve ads on typo sites that people tend to visit by accident.

The marketers alleged that such pages are low-quality and yield fewer purchases or other conversions than ads that appear on Google’s search results pages. The marketers also said they believed that clicks on ads on parked domains “were unlikely to lead to desirable business outcomes, and that placement on such pages could damage their brands.”

Google counters that parked-domain ads “perform as well as or better than ads on Search and Display Network sites.” The company also argues in court papers that it didn’t mislead or harm any of the plaintiffs by placing their ads on parked domains or error sites. Google recently lost a bid to dismiss the lawsuit before trial, which means the marketers that are suing can continue to gather evidence in the case.

Stay tuned…..

@AndrewHazen

Digital publishers looking to supplement ad revenue may want to look toward Ziff Davis. The company on Tuesday unveiled the launch of the ad platform BuyerBase and revealed the acquisition of LogicBuy.com, which provides tech deals and coupons.

BuyerBase, an audience-based ad-targeting platform, relies, in part, on a piece of code embedded in more than 100 content and commerce Web sites owned by Ziff Davis and third-party companies. The unidentified “collection of properties” under BuyerBase gets more than 40 million site visitors and generates more than a billion buying signals monthly. The companies agreed to provide Ziff Davis with the data to integrate into the platform.

Integrating the technology from the LogicBuy.com acquisition, the platform will serve up deals and coupons on specific technology across Ziff Davis properties such as PCMag.com. It will tap into relationships with tech manufacturers and retailers to bring deals to site visitors.

According to what I read in Media Post, Ziff Davis CEO Vivek Shah makes no qualms about it. “We want to reinvent the publishing model that connects content, data and commerce,” he says “This strategy is a three-leg stool and we just added two that we didn’t have.”

@AndrewHazen

For the past 5+ months our dedicated Prime Visibility team has spent countless hours and many sleepless nights working on an amazing project – the launch of Sleep.com

This is without a doubt a major category killer domain and will be THE AUTHORITY on Sleep and all things related to sleep!

We still have lots of work ahead of us as we continue to add content, create partnerships and speak with more advertisers….by the way, anyone with a relevant product or service that relates to sleep should certainly contact us.

Please feel free to visit Sleep.com and provide us with feedback….you can also follow us on twitter @Sleep_Com.  My gut tells me that the site will change over the next few months as we learn more about our visitors and what they want from Sleep.com

Time for me to take a nap now….

@AndrewHazen

Back in May, 2010 I announced that we were working closely with The Trump Organization and their exquisite las vegas condotel - Trump Towers Las Vegas.

I am extremely pleased to report that less than six months since TrumpVegasCondos.com went live, we are already ranks as follows in Google:

#17 vegas condo
#19 vegas condos
#11 vegas condo hotel
#21 las vegas condominiums
#14 las vegas penthouses
#27 vegas luxury condos
#30 las vegas luxury condo

And of course the site ranks well for branded terms such as: #2 & #7 for trump condos…
Needless to say traffic and leads are increasing each and every month!!

Stay tuned for more Trump related projects (GRIN)

@AndrewHazen

Today Google released two tools aimed at removing costs from serving up display ads across the Google Display Network.

The tools — Display Campaign Optimizer and Contextual Targeting Tool–are geared toward helping advertisers reach performance goals on the Google Display Network, simplify the entire system to buy and sell display ads, and open the entire ecosystem through innovation.

Display Campaign Optimizer manages targeted bids to generate more conversions such as sales or leads by finding the correct sites that drive performance. It does this within milliseconds. The tool, based on machine learning technology, determines what works and what doesn’t in real time and adjusts accordingly – amazing!!

A fully automated solution may not work for all campaigns and advertisers should not have to sacrifice control to gain efficiencies and boost performance.

The Contextual Targeting Tool automates the task of determining the keywords to target the words that work, so advertisers can boost performance by building campaigns in minutes rather than hours. The tool lets advertisers build hundreds of ad groups in minutes for companies that sell widgets to quickly scale campaign performance.

@AndrewHazen