April 12th, May 17th outages planned

Saturdays are great.  Even if you hold down a second job, have housework, errands, or whatever, it's nice to get away from the Monday-to-Friday grind.  Now, so that your Saturday won't include an unpleasant surprise, an announcement: AdWords accounts will be inaccessible for four hours.

Planned maintenance will keep people from signing in or tinkering with anything between 10 AM to 2 PM PDT on April 12th.  But on the Inside AdWords blog, "Blake" promised everyone, "Your campaigns will continue to run as usual."

Blake even gave a heads up about when future downtime should occur.  "AdWords system maintenance typically occurs on the second Saturday of each month during the above times - although in May it is planned to occur one week later than usual, on May 17th, due to Mother's Day," he wrote.  (And let that serve as a double reminder, lest you forget Mother's Day.)

That's about it, then.  Have a nice Saturday, and a good Friday and Sunday, too, while you're at it.

This year, Google invited AdWords advertisers to join a beta test of demographic bidding, a feature that helps you target your ads to users of a particular age group (such as ages 18-24), by gender, or to combinations of those groups.

You can use demographic bidding whether you are using contextual or placement targeting and with both CPC and CPM bidding. You can refine your reach based on users’ gender and age on certain sites in the Google content network such as MySpace and Friendster, whose users provide that information about themselves. AdWords receives the data in anonymous and aggregate form from participating partner sites, which means that users can’t be personally identified.

Customers have a lot of different information sources to select from, and a lot of different tools and methods to find and access content. Some people will go directly to a familiar site, others prefer to have content come to them through RSS feeds, and many discover new content sources via referrals from colleagues and search engines. Because many methods are available to users, you must ensure that you're best positioned to reach as many customers as possible in ways most convenient to them.

To encourage current customers to keep returning to read your content and to reach new customers, you must create many doorways to that content. "Connections," then, represent the second of my 12 Cs framework for thriving in the digital world.

There are many different approaches you can take. I've listed some connection points here and will discuss additional ones, such as widgets and content aggregators, next time.

Microsoft on Friday bought Rapt, a San Francisco-based online ad management firm, for an undisclosed sum. The move came three days after Google cleared its $3.1 billion acquisition of the ad serving company DoubleClick.
Both acquisitions are a sign of the heated battle between the search giant and the software giant for a share of the growing display advertising market. Microsoft (MSFT) has made aggressive moves into that market ever since Google (GOOG) announced its intention to buy DoubleClick last April. Since then Microsoft has spent $6 billion to buy aQuantive, an ad network that competes with Google’s AdSense, and last month made an unsolicited offer of more than $40 billion to take over Yahoo (YHOO). The Wall Street Journal reported that executives from both Microsoft and Yahoo met near Yahoo’s headquarters in Sunnyvale on Monday to have informal talks for the first time.

Mr. Fancy Pants
Using Google AdWords and Analytics, Cordarounds.com has seen a 200% return on their holiday spend, increased brand awareness, and strong growth of their return customer base.

New horizons
When he started Cordarounds, Chris Lindland didn’t have a business plan, a marketing plan, or an advertising budget. But he did have a special pair of horizontal corduroy pants. So he cinched his belt and set out to discover just how far he could push the idea that horizontal was the new vertical. “It started as a lark,” says Chris. “I couldn’t understand why there were no horizontal corduroy pants in the world. It seemed something you simply didn’t question – like gravity. Vertical corduroy just was. So I had a pair made. Suddenly everyone was touching my pants. The attention got me thinking.”