Posts filed under 'E-Marketing Advice'
For some reason, Google being the number one search engine - a fact that hasn’t changed since 2002 - is hitting all the e-zines as the top news story of this Monday morning. MediaPost’s article “Google Stays at the Top of the Search Heap” does cite some interesting statistics, but the most fascinating thing about these numbers (in my opinion) isn’t that Google is at the top, it’s the sheer volume of searches being performed on sites and/or networks whose core focus is not search (e.g., Facebook, Amazon, MySpace).
According to Nielson’s latest stats, in May 2008:
- Google’s share of the search market is 60% or 4.7 billion queries for the month
- Yahoo’s share of searches was 17% or 21% (2.4 billion queries), according to Nielson or Comsore respectively
- There were 10.8 billion search queries across Google, Yahoo, MSN, Ask and AOL
- YouTube searches hit 2 billion in May
- MySpace had 395 million queries
- Facebook had 121 million queries
- Ebay had 449 million queries
- Amazon.com had 141 million queries
I often tell clients that search is expanding well beyond search engines. My own search habits have changed throughout the years, and I’m glad to see that destinations other than pure play search engines are showing up on these types of studies. I wonder if iTunes will make the list. I’m always searching for music and podcats via iTunes and rarely go to Google or anywhere else for this information.
To be fair, Google’s not going anywhere for a long time. Another interesting headline about Google’s popularity appeared in Ad Age today titled, “America Has Spoken: In Google We Trust“, which reports that Google has bumped Microsoft off the top of the list of the most reputable company in America, according to a recent Harris Interactive poll. Marketing Pilgrim also picked up this story this morning. In short, 82% of Americans feel that Google is a reputable brand. Google is the “best liked” company in America, winning out above Johnson & Johnson, Intel, General Mills and Kraft Foods. And all this without spending a dime on advertising. Long live the Internet!
June 23rd, 2008
Google and Yahoo have recently added new features to their paid search platforms, some of which are extremely useful and some, well, not so much. It’s important for advertisers to pay attention to these changes because they often have a direct impact on your campaign. Here are a few of the latest changes, broken down by engine.
Google Adwords
Adwords Editor 6.0 was released on June 4, 2008. Advertisers can now create site-targeted campaigns, implement geo-targeting, export performance statistics to a CSV file, and a few other things which make this awesome tool even more awesome. Google provides a full list of the new features via their release notes. If you’re not using the Adwords Editor to build and manage campaigns, then you should download it immediately. As far as I’m concerned, it’s THE best tool out there to manage Adwords, plus it’s a great way to build a campaign which can be transferred to the other engines.
Landing Page Load Time Analysis is now available via the Keyword Analysis page if you log into your Adwords account online (thus, it’s not available via the Editor). Load time will be factored into Quality score any day now (mid-June according to Google). Needless to say, it’s important to check out your landing pages to see if your keyword quality has been effected.
Monthly Budgeting now Available - From the earliest days of Adwords, a campaign budget could only be set at the daily level, so if you wanted to spend a certain amount per month, you’d need to multiply it by 30. Now Google also gives advertisers the option to specify a monthly budget per campaign as well. This is a helpful way to assess how much you’ve budgeted per month at-a-glance, and I’m guessing they rolled it out to complement the “automatic matching” feature explained below. In my opinion it would be more useful if advertisers could set their budget at the account level, so you can never overspend. Yahoo actually has this functionality (go figure).
Automatic Matching - This is a new feature that’s currently in beta, so it’s not available in every account. Automatic matching is a setting at the campaign level which allows Google to automatically show ads for keywords that you’re not bidding on, based on the content of your web site compared with the terms in your campaign. The aim is to spend your budget in its entirety, so this option will only work if you’re not meeting your current daily spend limit. This can be dangerous, since many of us look at the overall daily spend across all campaigns, rather than the individual campaign daily spend. If you have been chosen to participate in this beta, you’ll see an alert when you log in (see screenshots, below). My advice is to opt out of this feature immediately! Google uses CTR to determine keyword relevancy, and we all know that can mean bupkus when it comes down to the bottom line.
If you’ve been chosen to participate in the “Automatic Matching” beta, here’s what you’ll see in your Account Snapshot when you log into Google.
CPA Bidding Out of Beta - Google recently enabled CPA bidding for all campaigns that qualify (you have to have received at least 200 conversions over the past 30 days). The way it works seems relatively simple - you adjust your CPA at the ad group level and Google automatically adjusts bids but never goes over your desired CPA. Per Google, “The Conversion Optimizer uses algorithms to predict, in real time, which clicks are likely to be most valuable. Based on these predictions, the Conversion Optimizer sets higher CPC bids for more valuable clicks and lower CPC bids for less valuable clicks. The predictions are based on your ad’s conversion history.” I haven’t tried this feature yet and it really seems too good to be true (thus it probably is). My recommendation is to test, test and test again.
Yahoo Search Marketing
Usability Enhancements - Yahoo added a bunch of enhancements to the search console in mid-May which makes managing keywords and ad groups easier. All disabled objects (keywords, ad groups or campaigns) will appear in red text, a status column now appears beside all watched campaigns which helps identify why a campaign is offline, and a host of other usability tweaks were added. Check it out on Yahoo’s blog when you can.
New Click Filter Report - This is a new report that Yahoo rolled out in April 2008 which lets advertisers see the number of clicks deemed invalid and thus not charged to your account. You can customize the report to show invalid clicks by campaign or ad group, which is very helpful in determining what categories produce the highest amount of invalid clicks. Yahoo suggests reviewing this report for sudden spikes and also comparing the total clicks against your web traffic stats in order to determine if there’s been any incidents of click fraud. You can file a click investigation request with Yahoo if you feel there’s a problem.
Minimum Bid Changes - In late February 2006, Yahoo implemented a change to their reserve bid pricing structure. Previously, all keywords could enter the auction at a minimum bid of .10 or higher. But throughout February and March, Yahoo changed the reserve bid to a variable amount which could be lower, but oftentimes higher, than the minimum bid of .10. In short, Yahoo is using a quality score system, similar to Google’s quality score algorithm, to determine the minimum bid for each keyword in the auction. Quality is based on various factors with CTR being the most important. Other quality indicators include keyword value (e.g., level of competition on a particular keyword) and that appears to be it for the moment (e.g., landing page is not currently a factor).
New Keyword Generator Tool - Yahoo enhanced their keyword generator tool at the start of 2008. The tool enables you to add up to 500 keywords to your account instantly, provides a list of related keywords for a given ad group, and provides suggestions for keywords based on a given URL or description.
Keyword Exclusion - Yahoo now enables advertisers to add up to 250 excluded keywords at the account and ad group levels (up from 50 keywords). You can only use excluded keywords on “expanded match” terms in Yahoo. Excluding irrelevant terms is an excellent way to refine your campaign and get more targeted traffic.
June 16th, 2008
For the past twelve years, Ad Age has released a report titled “Women to Watch” which is, in their words, “a special report on the women in advertising, marketing and media whose accomplishments and potential have made them standouts.”
The 2008 Women to Watch are primarily women who work for large global, and extremely corporate entities the likes of which include Mindshare (owned by WPP), Citi, General Motors, McDonald’s, Johnson & Johnson and MediaVest (a company that calls its media planners “media architects”).
I don’t get it. Hooray for women’s lib and all but, seriously, what makes these women “women to watch?” Aren’t the women to watch at the bottom, kicking and clawing their way up? I mean, good for you if you’re the Media Director at McDonald’s Worldwide, but this doesn’t make you an out-of-the box thinker. Hell, if I had 810 million dollars to spend on media, I think I could get pretty creative too.
On the other hand, if I was in charge of that much money, I’d probably just hire someone smart to be creative for me. And, come to think of it, when you have that much money to spend on media, you don’t really have to be creative. Try stretching a 20,000 budget across six months. You’ve got to put your thinking cap on.
It’s the small agencies, the junior planners and the start-ups on a shoestring that have the big ideas. The little guys have to really get creative to compete with big corporations.
These are the people and companies I work with every day. These are truly the people to watch. I want to give props to all the hard workers out there that are shaping the way we do business in online marketing and search. Oh and I’m not sticking to just women. We’re all in this together.
Jackie Dooley’s Media & Search People to Watch - 2008
Note: thefreedictionary.com defines “rank and file” as: People who constitute the main body of any group
Nick Lindauer, Director of Search Engine Marketing @ Torque | FKMA
At just twenty-six years old Nick has risen to the director role of Torque | FKM, an agency based in Houston. I met Nick in 2005 while freelancing for Acronym Media (a small SEM shop in NYC). He comprised their entire SEO department. Just Nick. He went on to work at NEO (the search division of Ogilvy) and in just two years rose to lead a team of twelve. During this entire time, Nick was the sole proprietor of an online retail store that sold specialty hot sauce. His tiny NYC apartment was lined with inventory. He did all the SEO for the site and it was naturally ranked at the very top of Google for the term “hot sauce.” He sold the business for a nice profit when he moved to Texas. Nick is a search marketing genius. He’s made me realize that anyone worth their salt in search marketing should have a rough idea of how to build a web site and/or maintain a blog.
Tessa Ohlendorf, Internet Marketer - Self-Employed
I met Tessa in 2006 while I was working at the world’s smallest online media buying and planning shop in NYC. There were five of us then, and I was the only one who really knew anything about online marketing until Tessa came along. Tessa is a savvy online media planner who has no trouble pulling all nighters, pitching in front of clients and pulling together a plan in less time than it takes most people to do their taxes. She can negotiate make goods and bonus inventory better than anyone I know, and she’s great at pulling interactive teams together on the fly, based on a the needs of a given client or project. I’m really impressed by how Tessa is able to enjoy her love of traveling without missing a beat at work. Since she’s a sole proprietor, she is extremely mobile. In the past two years she’s set up shop in Canada, New York City, California and most recently the Hamptons on Long Island. She knows her stuff and I’d definitely count her as a woman to watch for 2008.
Ula Tuszewicka, Online Marketing Consultant - Self Employed
It is the rare online marketer who can claim expertise in both media planning and search, but Ula can do both with equal skill. She’s worked on both large and small campaigns, and can set up a search campaign from the preliminary keyword list and see it through to the final report. I’ve referred Ula to more than one colleague over the past couple of years because she is so versatile and, like Tessa, is able to set up shop wherever she lands (she lives in Seattle but travels to Poland frequently to visit family). For me Ula represents the ultimate “woman to watch” in media. She understands the industry on her own terms, and actually gets things done. She’s an example of someone who jumped off the corporate ladder in disgust, and began building her own dreams based on an industry she fully understands.
Karin Blake, Search Account Manager, Retail - Avenue A | Razorfish
I worked briefly with Karin on some projects for Avenue A | Razorfish last year. At the time she’d been managing a very large retail campaign for a high profile lingerie vendor (and yes, it is THAT company). She knew everything there is to know about Atlas and patiently showed me how to traffic a campaign. Karin is young, extremely bright and an up and comer in the industry. I asked her to write a few words about herself…
“I started at AA|RF in 2005 after studying the moderately unrelated topic of Anthropology at Columbia. I think I was number 8 or so of the search team at that point in time (and 22.5 years old), and I sat in the corner next to a printer for about 4 months while we built the search program of a major financial services client. Over the next 3 years and a few acquisitions later, the search team scaled 4x in personnel and however many times over in $$, and I now lead AA|RF’s NY Retail Search group. I have a team of 5 search managers, covering 6 different clients. I have a search box tattooed on my back (just kidding). But I’ve thought about it.”
Ad Age doesn’t often write about the 22 year old who gets stuck pivoting spreadsheets next to the printer for 8 hours a day, but that’s why I’m here! Kudos to Karin, for making the industry a smarter place.
**more to come**
June 9th, 2008
Here’s why you need to proofread your ads, or at least run them through a spell check.
Notice the spelling of the word “because.” How does an ad like this even get through Google’s editorial filter? Who knows, but it happens. Even computer geeks aren’t perfect! This ad came up when I searched for the term “autoresponder” - so it’s also completely irrelevant. It links to a page that boasts the headline, “How To Build a Large Mailing List That Will Become Your Own ATM Machine” which also doesn’t contain the term “autoresponder” and only has one possible action - give up your name and email address for further information.
They’re probably paying a high CPC for poor quality and the landing page looks unprofessional (at best) and not entirely on the up and up (at worst). So I can’t imagine conversion rate is great, but who knows. Maybe there are a lot of people out there who think a mailing list can magically earn them money. This smells like a get-rich-quick scheme and this type of page is probably a contributing factor to why people are clicking less on paid search ads.
Stay tuned for future bad ads!
April 1st, 2008
Okay, I’m coming out of blog hibernation (blibernation?) to wax poetic about my strong feelings AGAINST pricing out search services as a percentage of the media spend. First, as I’ve written in the past, search management is different from media management.
The gist of my last post on media vs. search management is this: online media planning isn’t the same as offline media planning, and search media planning isn’t the same as, say, buying banners. What’s different? Well, in a nutshell:
- Search planners manage keywords not vendors (sure, vendors are involved, but let’s be honest. There are only two that really matter - Google and Yahoo - unless you’re doing an extensive local campaign or dealing with online shopping engines, and that’s a different post altogether.
- Search planners continually test, rewrite and refresh ad copy
- Search planners have to deal with Google’s quality score and Yahoo’s quality restrictions.
I could go on, but really, the bottom line is that an effective search marketing campaign takes ongoing management. And by ongoing, I mean daily and weekly changes should be applied to the campaign to make it a positive and, dare I say, fulfilling, experience for the advertiser.
It doesn’t matter if you’re spending $10,000 a month or $100,000 a month on search ads, you still need to manage the campaign to make it work. This is really why charging clients a percentage of the media spend doesn’t work.
I know a lot of people wil disagree with me here. Obviously it works in the agency’s favor when the budget is 100K/month. So in an agency setting, the larger campaigns pay for the smaller campaigns. But in the real world what happens with the smaller clients is they suffer from poor management of their campaign compared with the bigger spenders.
There. I’ve said it. Moving on.
I think the best way to start with any search project is by charging a monthly fee based on estimated hours. There are many variables to starting a new project that have nothing to do with the actual budget amount. Keyword and competitive research, historical campaign data review, the number of search engines included in the initial plan and the level of reporting all factor into the fee.
I’m also in love with the idea of performance-based pricing once a campaign has been launched and running for about three months. This involves getting paid per lead or sale instead of being tied to a specific number of hours.
This often entails a bit of a loss from the management side of things for the first month but it’s an excellent incentive for me to put in more hours to really get a campaign performing. The emphasis here is that agencies are motivated to make the campaign a success (success is defined by the client’s goals) and not by the amount of money they spend. If you spend money on search just to meet the forecasted budget, and this can be done in any number of ways that do not benefit the client, then your campaign will fail.
Clients and agencies both need to to ask themselves if the “percentage of media” model works for them. In the vast majority of cases, the answer is probably not.
March 20th, 2008
I picked up a magazine called Adbusters at Barnes and Noble the other day because even though I make my living advertising, it’s good to have some balance when it comes to media. I know how subversive and ever-present it can seem.
Per the Adbusters Web site, the magazine:
“is a not-for-profit, reader-supported, 120,000-circulation magazine concerned about the erosion of our physical and cultural environments by commercial forces.”
The site goes on to describe its readership as follows:
“Our readers are professors and students; activists and politicians; environmentalists and media professionals; corporate watch dogs and industry insiders; kids who love our slick ad parodies and parents who worry about their children logging too many hours a day in the electronic environment.”
So I think it’s safe to say that not too many search marketers read the magazine, and I thought the industry as a whole would be interested in hearing the magazine’s take on buying keywords for various political campaigns. There are just a few paragraphs within a larger article about political advertising. The search piece has the frightening headline, “McCain buys ‘terror’”
From the November 2007 issue of Adbusters:
“Search for “war on terror” on Google and you may find a John McCain, Mitt Romney or Ron Paul advertisement pop up. Type in “universal health care” and the campaign site for Dennis Kucinich could appear.”
“In an effort to find ways of infiltrating the internet, US presidential candidates are paying to have their advertisements displayed beside popular search terms in Google. In what will be the most expensive and invasive election campaign in US history, politicians have now taken to branding themselves by buying words.”
…”It appears Google finally offers politicians the opportunity to buy some “integrity” and “honesty.”
Wow. I mean, really? Is search marketing so colossally misunderstood that people think buying keywords that are actually relevant to what you’re selling (in this case, the politicians are selling themselves and their own views on the issues of “terror” or “health care”) is invasive and misleading?
At least with search advertising, people are actively seeking information on the various topics they type into Google, as opposed to ads that suddenly appear front and center on a Web page or in your e-mail in box. It’s not exactly accurate to say that advertisements are displayed “beside popular search terms in Google.” As we all know, the ads are displayed beside the top-ranked organic search results. The organic results could arguably be considered advertising as well, particularly for those Web sites that are painstakingly optimized to rank well. So what should show up when someone types in a search if not search listings, paid or otherwise? Nothing?
I’m so immersed in the practice of search marketing that I rarely pause to consider how it must be perceived by those outside the industry. Do people really differentiate between paid and organic listings? I’d assumed the “Sponsored Links” heading on Google was a fairly obvious indication that the listings beneath them were ads, but in looking at a search results page, I could see how it would be easy to miss the unobtrusive label.
Nevertheless, the Adbusters article on political keyword advertising seems at best naive, and at worst, completely incorrect. Buying terms that are focused on political issues is entirely appropriate if you’re a politician trying to sell yourself on these issues. Now, if you buy the term “miserable failure” and write an ad about how George Bush sucks (if only), that’s a different story. Google wouldn’t let you get away with that anyway, but then I doubt Adbusters is aware of the strict quality guidelines that Google has in place to prevent such abuse from occurring (yes, this is ME talking - I don’t hate Google, I just don’t like arbitrary price increases that affect my beautiful campaigns).
November 3rd, 2007
Since creating, launching and managing search campaigns (mostly on Google) is how I make my living, I’ve been trying really hard not to blast the hell out of Google for its latest dubious Adwords improvements.
I’m clearly not happy based on some previous blog posts, but I’ve been giving Google the benefit of the doubt. Maybe they really do want to have better search results for their users. Maybe they really are acting in our best interest (as advertisers) when they penalize us for poor quality - even if we don’t think it’s poor. Plus there’s all the information they do give us - like the search query report (*ahem* USELESS) and the ability to have ads up and running instantly (if we don’t mind paying $5.00 or $10.00 for arbitrary quality penalties).
But, well, now I’m mad (based on a series of off-putting emails from one of my reps) and when I get mad, I get snarky. And what are blogs for if not a little snark?
It must be nice being Google. Here’s a fun list.
If I were Google I’d…
- Increase my fees by 100 - 1000% overnight. Then when my clients complained I’d tell them it was for their own good. The fee increase would only be in place until they improved the quality of their business model. I wouldn’t give specifics on how to better increase it (don’t want anyone cheating!) - but I’d develop a list of guidelines they could painfully try to interpret (e.g., “no blue in the logos, make sure you link to cool stuff on your home page, don’t use the word “cheese” EVER, etc.”)
- I would consider lowering my fees if the changes had been made to my satisfaction (isn’t that nice of me?). This would occur during my review process which I would claim happened “regularly” (e.g., every one to 360 days).
- I would create an exhaustive database of guidelines and rules which I’d label “help” and direct all clients to this database for every single issue. No one likes customized answers, after all. It’s all about automation!
- I would begin referring to my services as “self-serve” any time a client below a certain fee level asked for additional attention or assistance. In fact, I would tout this as a key differentiator to my services compared with other, less popular and/or wonderful providers. Persistent questions would be met with persistent responses by me (or a fleet of mindless sales drones I’ve hired) directing questions to my growing database of canned “help” files.
- I would assign a team of people to my largest accounts and make sure that they stay happy and well-served. It’s in my best interest to grow the largest accounts, after all. It also serves the greater good because when big corporations are happy, everyone is happy! Therefore I would send all the big clients refrigerators, t-shirts, lava lamps, ipods, towels and other goodies covered with my logo (and my love).
- I would be very courteous and professional with people who complain about my new policies and would once again restate that they’re the ones who benefit from these changes in the end. After all, they’ll have a better business model and happier customers. They’ll be thanking me!!
- If my clients decide to take their business elsewhere, I would shake my head sadly but wouldn’t try to stop them. There’s always more clients, after all. Plus, I am ME and I own the market. The complainers would likely be just jealous of my success anyway.
In the words of the immortal Daffy Duck, “Consequences, schmonsequences, as long as I’m rich.”
October 26th, 2007
Sometimes I long for the good old days of paid search, when GoTo.com was the only player, I was one of the only people who knew about them (or so it seemed) and bids started at just .01.
I knew it was too good to last, but prices continued to remain affordable for a long time and even when Google first introduced its veil of secrecy (otherwise known as the “quality score”), I continued to have faith in paid search as the great equalizer of online advertising - that is, it was cheap to start up and almost anyone could benefit from it regardless of the size of their budget. Not no more.
Barrier to entry
In July 2006, Google introduced it’s a new quality score algorithm which dictated some guidelines to advertisers about what Google considers a “useful” destination URL (or not). In fact, I avoided the term “landing page” deliberately because it’s currently going the way of the “doorway page.”
The short-short of it is, that if Google’s automated adBot finds the quality of your keywords lacking (either due to lack of good ad copy or a less-than-useful landing page) you get “slapped” with a minimum bid requirement of $5.00 to $10.00 (in rare cases it can also be about $1.00) which means your keyword remains inactivate and out of the game unless you raise your minimum bid.
Now, fast forward to August 2007 - Google introduced a new and improved Adwords “top placement formula” which they claim gives advertisers more control over achieving a top position in the paid search results, because placement is now dependent on minimum bid and quality score, than on what other advertisers are bidding and actually paying per click for the same keywords. Clear as mud? Check out Gray Wolf’s lucid analysis of the new formula for some clear (and disturbing) insight as to why this is BAD.
A tangible example of why this sucks
I recently restructured one of my client’s accounts because many of the terms were being slapped with $5 to $10.00 minimum bid penalties. I rewrote ads so they were painfully customized, I incorporated language in all the ads to match the landing pages (which were developed specifically to compliment the search campaign) and I happily relaunched everything last week. The main change I made to the keywords was I switched them from Exact to Phrase match because I figured the ads were more customized and would do more screening, so why not go for more volume?
Yesterday I logged into the new account and found that 90% of the terms had been penalized for low quality - again, these were the exact same terms as in the old account with the exception of match type. The ads were more customized and the landing pages had not changed. The campaign was essentially crippled - burning at about 1% of what we’d been spending prior to the restructure.
I activated all the disabled keywords by raising bids the required $5.00 to $10.00 and went back a couple of hours later only to discover that the client’s CPC was, you guessed it, $5.00 or $10.00 - even though many had little or no advertiser competition.
So I paused the campaign and restarted the old one. My old bids, for the most part, have remained intact although the best-converting term is now disabled due to poor quality. I have a call with the client today and I’m going to recommend reviewing landing pages as our next step in trying to combat this issue.
What’s a search planner to do?
I’ve written to Google multiple times to try to get some clarity over this issue and explain that my client is not an affiliate, or a spammer, or someone without a substantial product. In fact, they are one of the biggest publishers of technical and IT books in the world.
Google keeps pointing me to the landing page guidelines and essentially saying it’s up to the client to improve the quality score so we can lower the bid. If they want to bid on the terms that are being penalized, they have pay the big bucks.
I’m on a quest to see if it is possible to raise the quality score based on the nebulous information Google provides to advertisers via the Adwords help and blog. In the meantime, I think the best way to get the CPC down for search is to reallocate funds to Yahoo and MSN, and that’s what I intend to recommend to this client.
Oh, and in case you think I’m just a raving lunatic with a conspiracy theory - Microsoft apparently had this same exact thing happen to them for the term “hotmail” which was being directed to Hotmail’s login page.
And while this new approach may leave advertisers SOL, it’s certainly a happy ending for Google, whose Q3 2007 earnings rose 49%.
Update: Apparently Google has decided to throw us a bone. Thanks to Kevin Gibbons for posting about this on Sphinn.com.
October 24th, 2007
I think the most appropriate definition of the term media, as it relates to advertising, is defined by the Miriam Webster dictionary as “a channel or system of communication, information, or entertainment.”
A media planner’s spin on this definition would probably read more like, “The ads that run on a channel or system of communication, information, or entertainment.”
So, with this clarification in mind, “are search ads media?” Yes and no.
From a budgeting perspective, search is media. After all, you must allocate a percentage of your total advertising budget to pay for search ads. The distinction blurs at the planning level because planning search is a lot different than planning other types of media, even online media.
Media Planning 101
During the typical media planning process, we consider many things about the media property (or vendor) we select to place our ads. Here are some examples of vendors, by channel.
Let’s say we’re looking at NationalGeographic.com for a travel camapign, we’d review a list of criteria associated with this Web site such as target audience, volume of traffic, available inventory (e.g., number of ad impressions we can secure), the types of ads available, pricing structure and conversion potential. We ultimately decide whether or not to include the site in our plan based on a combination of the above, plus the attractiveness of the vendor’s proposal.
But none the standard criteria for selecting or eliminating a media vendor applies to search planning because…
Key Difference #1: Search planners already know where the media is going to run.
If you’re a search planner then Google, Yahoo and MSN which together hold over 85% of the total share of searches in the U.S. (according to comScore in July of 2006) are going to be in your plan, and that’s pretty much it. These three Web sites hold the key to nearly all the search ad inventory available online - that’s like saying there are only three t.v. stations available where all advertisers in the U.S. can place ads. That would make it impossible for nearly all but the most lucrative advertisers and agencies to secure coveted ad space on television. So how come search planning takes so much time? Well, because of…
Key Difference #2: Search planning is about selecting keywords, not vendors
Here’s where media planners who don’t know much about online planning (or online planners who don’t know much about search ) choke . With search we’re actually planning keywords, not vendors. Thus, there is an unlimited number of media placements available (A placement in search is equivalent to “ad space” or “time slot”).
When every single term listed in the dictionary translates to an ad placement, the possibilities are limitless. Every keyword and keyword combination becomes a possible ad placement. Applying tactical targeting to your keywords opens up even more inventory (e.g., broad match vs. phrase match, ad scheduling, geo-targeting, demo-targeting). All keywords must be managed, just as all vendors in a traditional plan must be managed. Imagine a media plan that had over 10,000 vendors in it…that’d be quite a bear to manage.
Most offline media is limited by the hours in the day or the physical space available to run an ad (e.g. a page in a magazine). Even online media that take up real estate on a web page or a newsletter is limited by frequency and available space. Not so with search. Which brings me to…
Key Difference #3: Search ads are simultaneous
Since search ads are tied to keyword, user location and, to some extent, user search behavior instead of time slot or available space, search engines can utilize the same exact ad space for multiple advertisers at the exact same point in time. So if I do a search for “kid’s pajamas” on Google at 8:00 a.m. in New York, and my mother searches for “bird food” on Google.com at 8:00 a.m. in New Jersey, our search results will both be populated with ads from very different advertisers which appear on the exact same Web site at the exact same point in time. Of course the pages we are looking at are different pages - dynamically created to match our search queries.
Other key differences
I don’t know many online or offline media planners who regularly change ad copy, landing page text and move media dollars around on a near-daily basis. But search planners do routinely during the course of a campaign. We cap keywords that are overspending, reallocate the spend across categories, engines and keywords and routinely introduce new ad copy to the campaign. Imagine if you had to write new banner copy every two weeks?
Advertisers take note
When your agency takes a chunk of your media budget and allocates it to “search” this often means they are handing it over to a search agency who then manages the money across the top three search vendors. The problem with this is that you’re already paying the agency a percentage of the media budget, then the search agency also gets a cut so by the time your keyword ads are launched, the search budget is greatly reduced.
My advice? Consider working directly with a search agency rather than going through your main advertising or media agency, or work with agencies that have in-house search capabilities. If you do decide to go with your media agency of record, make sure you understand the pricing structure of their search management services before you hand over your search budget to them.
September 8th, 2007
For the majority of Google advertisers who are not professional SEMs or don’t work with a search marketing professional in some capacity or other, Google’s content network remains a mystery. It is a tantalizing way to get more volume for a campaign, but conversions are inevitably lower (often MUCH lower) than ads on the search network, and click volume can be extremely high which translates into big bucks.
Understanding what Web sites are opted into Google’s content network (e.g., display Google ads) is the first step in creating order out of the chaos. For example, today MediaPost reported that CNN.com will be continuing its partnership with Google Adsense and opening up its extensive inventory to all advertisers. The official press release about the agreement can be found on Google’s site.
Google is notoriously tight-lipped about the sites in the content network. However, they will occasionally announce partnerships like the one with CNN.com in order to dangle the carrot of high-quality traffic in front of their many Adwords advertisers.
The possibility of getting your ad on a top tier Web site such as CNN is definitely a compelling reason to opt into the content network, but before you launch a content-targeted campaign on Google and let it rip, there are a few things you should know.
First of all, in a content-targeted campaign you can’t actually choose the sites your ad appears on. You can only do this with a site-targeted campaign. What’s the difference?
- A site-targeted campaign is created at the campaign level (in the campaign-summary tab within Adwords) and runs on an impression-based cost model (e.g., cost per thousand impressions or CPM). That means you get charged for every 1000 ad impressions whether or not someone actually clicks on your ad. Even though you can set your CPM via a bidding system, this can still get pretty expensive.
- A content-targeted campaign can only be set up as a keyword-targeted campaign. That is, there is no separate content-targeting campaign setup option within Adwords. So, after you’ve created your keyword-targeted campaign, you’ll need to opt out of the Google and partner search network and opt into the content network, which can be done at the campaign level. Clear as mud?
So how can you refine your content-targeted campaign so that your ads show up on high quality sites only? Well, it’s not entirely possible to eliminate all poor-performing sites, but you can certainly eliminate a lot by adding a list of URLs where you don’t want your ads to appear.
First create a content-only campaign based on your top performing keywords. You can do this easily using Google’s Adwords Editor which allows you to copy an entire campaign and clone it in about three seconds. Creating content-only campaigns also gives you complete control over ad messaging, which should be different from keyword-targeted ads since user motivation is different with content-targeted ads.
Then get a list of sites that are currently running Google ads. To do this you can create a site-targeted campaign (but remember, don’t launch it or you’ll pay on a CPM, not a CPC basis).
- First, log in to Adwords - it can’t be done from the Adwords Editor.
- From the Campaign Summary page select “create a site-targeted campaign”
- When you get to the “Target Your Ad” page select “List URLs” This is the good part! You can search for specific Web sites that are showing ads in the content-network if you’re curious to see who’s partnered with Google by typing in a specific URL. For example, when I typed in CNN.com, Google showed me a list of similar sites displaying Google ads including Digg.com, SFgate.com, Nasdaq.com and many more.
- If you want to see what sites might display your ads within the content network, then paste the keywords your targeting into appropriate field and see what comes up. When I typed in a short list of SEM-related keywords I came up with a list of very low-traffic Web sites and/or competitor sites. I saved this list to a spreadsheet and went back to my content-targeted campaign to add them as negative URLs (this can be done by selecting Tools/Site Exclusion in the Adwords console.
I have one more trick up my sleeve for weeding out poor-performing sites in a content-targeted campaign. Run a Placement Report report on your campaign. This report lists some sites where your ad appears in the content network and if you’re tracking conversions through Adwords, you can see the best performing sites and eliminate the sites that don’t convert. This report is limited in that it doesn’t disclose all the URLs, but instead lists things like “Domain Ads” or “Other” as this post on SE Roundtable explains.
The key point of this extremely long post is that you can definitely benefit from Google’s high-profile content partnerships if you implement some optimization strategies, but they’re not necessarily going to make it easy for you to do this on a cost per click basis. My advice is to test, review results, weed out poorly performing sites and test some more. You might also consider running a site-targeted campaign on select Tier one sites to gauge performance - just be sure to watch the spend closely and (did I mention) test, test test!
August 29th, 2007
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