At 6pm on WebmasterRadio.FM host Jeremy Schoemaker, aka ShoeMoney, shares his insights on contextual advertising, affiliate marketing, PayPerClick, subscription sales and auction ads.

WebmasterRadio.FM hosts a daily schedule of shows covering a variety of internet marketing strategies and tactics, with a focus on search engine optimization.  Listeners can tune in with with Windows Media, iTunes or Real Player. 

Read more Shoemaker at his blog.

Lee Odden recently sat down with John Slade, Yahoo!'s Senior Director for Global Product Management, to talk about the company's recent upgrades to its pay-per-click advertising platform (codnamed "Panama"). Odden has now made the transcript of the interview available on his Online Marketing Blog. In the interview, Slade points out the major differences between the new platform and the old as well as what he feels are the competitive advantages the service offers over Google's AdWords. Read the full interview here.

In an e-mail to its advertisers, YSM announced it has started making some changes to its advertiser user interface. It is 'dumbing-down' the information it is giving advertisers on the keywords they're bidding on. For each keyword, YSM has been giving advertisers its position in the search engine along with the ad's cost-per-click at that position. Now, advertisers will only know the 'Estimated Average Position'. Another change is that advertisers will see a range of bids for the top positions, whereas now advertisers can see the bids for each position. Yahoo! also states that its 'View Bids' tool will also be removed.

Janet Meiners has uncovered a new keyword research tool called Keywordtopia.  It gathers keywords from multiple sources including WordTracker, Keyword Discovery, the Google Keyword Tool and of course, Yahoo!'s Search Term Suggestion Tool.

There are a couple of other neat features that make this one stand out.  One is it automatically searches other sources for complimentary keywords that the above tools don't turn up.  The other time-saving feature is that it organizes the keywords it finds into logical groups so you can import them easier into Ad Groups in Google AdWords.  Learn more about the tool at Keywordtopia.com.

Sarah from the Inside AdWords team has posted the first of a two-part series discussing Google's recent AdWords Quality Score changes implemented on November 6. In the post she explains why the update occurred so close to the holiday season, and how relevant an ad's click-through rate is to its overall Quality Score. She also answers why the new Website Optimizer does not play a role in the Quality Score. Read her full commentary on the Google Inside AdWords blog.

Google is introducing several new features to its AdWords desktop. Blogger Jeremy Mayes of PPC Discussions describes a test of the new website optimization service that helps with multivariate/split testing. Mayes also previews two other features -- the Change Client Manager, which allows users to transfer client accounts and an Ads Diagnostic Tool that helps determine if your ads are displaying for a particular keyword phrase.

In an earlier news story, Scott Jangro reported seeing that AdWords' Dynamic Keyword Insertion didn't always work, and that this odd behavior seemed to start happening at the same time last week's Quality Score updates were introduced. His suspicions have now been validated by none other than Google itself. As Jangro comments, "Yesterday, I received conformation from Google that this is in fact related to the keyword quality scores. According to the Google rep, the usage of the keyword insertion may not be performed if the quality score of the keyword is too low." Read Jangro's full commentary on his blog.

Affiliate marketing blogger Scott Jangro has advised his readers to check their AdWords PPC campaigns. Jangro reports that his click through rates on ads using dynamic keyword insertion (i.e., the "{Keyword: }" tag) have dropped since the latest Google Slap. In describing the problem, Jangro notes that "In cases where the keyword should be getting replaced into the ad, the default text is getting used. Occasionally, I will see the keyword properly getting inserted into the ad text, but after a refresh it goes away. It’s difficult to know what other advertisers are putting into this ad, but it does appear to be happening to others." Read Jangro's full post here.

On her popular ClickNewz! blog, Lynn Terry has posted a "quick list of AdSense Q&A" excerpted from her discussion forum. The list contains useful AdSense insights such as when it is advantageous to use AdSense on your site and alternatives to AdSense worth considering. See Terry's blog post for the full Q&A.

Loren Baker of Search Engine Journal is reporting that Amazon has launched a new service called Clickriver. Ads purchased through the service "will be shown in the sponsored results within Amazon.com searches and on some product detail pages", according to Baker. Read Baker's blog post for additional details.

Adam Viener reports on ReveNews about a study released today that demonstrates substantially improved results for pay-per-click campaigns using certain techniques. The study found that click-through rates improved by 38% when keyword insertion was used in the ad. Advertising.com also saw a 36% improvement in conversions when deep linking was used, and a 15% increase in click volumes when using keyword insertion. Read the press release here.

Microsoft has made available 100 coupons to share with Shoemaker's readers good for a $50 credit on new Adcenter accounts (Adcenter is Microsoft's pay-per-click advertising offering). Shoemaker is offering 50 of the 100 today on his blog, with the remaining 50 to be made available during his radio show next Tuesday. The offer is valid through November 30, 2006 or when all coupons have been claimed -- whichever comes first. Further information on the offer's terms is available on Shoemaker's blog.

The recent AdWords Quality Score update, or "Google Slap" as it's been called, is a recent algorithm change by Google to increase the relevancy and user experience of advertisements published on its search engine. The algorithm change has negatively impacted many internet marketers who are now scrambling to find information on how to make their ads acceptable to the Google gods again. Dio at Threadwatch noticed that eBay can provide some excellent examples for marketers to model in creating quality, relevant ads acceptable to the new algorithm <snicker>.

On Thursday, August 3, Matt Bacak and Josh Brown explain their Google AdSense and AdWords secrets during the Hour of Power teleseminar. Registration is available at no-charge here.

Brad Geddes of eWhisper.net has released an in-depth analysis of the recent AdWords Quality Score changes. Geddes uses a real site as a case study to present a before-and-after picture of the changes he made to get the cost-per-click back down to prior levels, albeit at a reduced conversion rate. Read Geddes case study here.