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In search advertising, one has just a few seconds to catch a potential
customer's attention and separate their business from the competition. The
headline of any ad copy can be used to do the heavy lifting, saying “click
on me, I have the information you are searching for.”
Utilizing keywords from your search campaign in the title of the ad copy
generates more clicks, as searchers are more likely to click on an ad that
looks relevant to their exact search. More clicks bring more search traffic
and also increase the quality score the search engine assigns to the
campaign. Higher quality score = higher placement on the search return at a
bid. Higher placements yield more visibility and derive associated goodwill
from the engine as searches find the advertisers to be credible.
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In search marketing, relevancy is king of conversions. You want users to land on relevant pages that are optimized for the keyword or keyword phrase that took them there – whether it be an organic or paid listing. This makes the user happy because they find exactly what they’re looking for and it makes the advertiser happy because it leads to more conversions. Everyone’s just happy, happy, happy.
But what about branding in the search engines? Is there such a thing? Of course there is. And although it cannot be as easily measured, it is critical in shaping the users opinion about your site. If you’ve read The Brand Gap (which I highly recommend), you’ll know that a brand has nothing to do with what we think it is or want it to be. A brand is what the consumer (or in this case the user) thinks of your product or service or site. So what do users think of your site when they find it in the search engines? Do they click on your link and find irrelevant information? Do they always see your name pop up when searching? Does this make your site more trust-worthy?
These are the questions we need to keep in mind when performing any type of search marketing campaign. You can increase your brand presence by making sure you’re visible for industry searches and by placing the name of your site in the title or body copy of your listing.
A few weeks ago, Google CEO Eric Schmidt argued that internet is becoming a “cesspool” of irrelevancy and that brands will win out in the end. Aaron Wall of seobook.com reiterated Google’s stance on the value of brands in search engines in a recent article. Unfortunately, it’s not very easy to track how effective branding in the search engines can be. Users who visit an e-commerce site might research online, but make the purchase at the physical store. Companies may visit a B2B site, but decide to make a purchase months later – making it hard to track that user in analytic programs.
Remember that relevancy should always be your top concern, but it’s important to consider that you need to be competitive for some keywords for positioning purposes and not necessarily because they increase your conversions or click-though rates. Make sure that you are still using targeted keywords and taking users to pages that fill their needs. If relevancy is king, then branding is queen.
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A few weeks back, Adweek authored an article called Google Adsense: It’s In the Game. In addition to the witty title, the contents of the article were very interesting – Google is infiltrating their way into the world of online games with Adsense.
For some of us, this may not come as a surprise. The discussion of in-game advertising has been a mildly hot topic for the last few years. What’s interesting to me is to see how the placement of in-game ads evolve. In the article, a scenario is played out in which a gamer is playing online and has to wait for a 15-second ad spot before continuing. Seems like a hassle, right?
As far as I understand, Adsense for games will be integrated into free online games, which have been wildly popular in recent years. It’s hard to be upset with ads in a video game that you’re playing for no fee. After all, they have to make a revenue stream somehow. I think it’s a legit solution to bring some advertising dollars into a medium where millions of people are present. Whether or not advertising to intense gamers by interrupting their play will work is a different story.
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According to reports in Internet Retailer, October 2008 pay-per-click advertisers experienced an increase in ad rates by 14%. During this period Google accounted for 77% of search advertising budgets and accounted for about 62% of searches.
At the heart of this growth for Google is the user experience. User’s surveyed saw Google scoring higher in consumer satisfaction, while Yahoo slipped, and Microsoft remained steady.
For search marketing this means that as competition increases on Google AdWords advertisers must have the right strategy to harness the best clicks, and create campaigns focused on driving qualified conversions.
So why has Google continued to increase revenue, the key is in how they have branded themselves and how that translates to the understanding tat they are serving multiple customers: Searchers, Advertisers, Web Site Owners, Content Providers, Consumer protection agencies, Governments. Even as they have added advertising to many of the new acquisitions, such as YouTube, Google has kept consistent with their branding: clean layout and relevant results, both organically and paid. As long as Google continues to improve tracking and targeting features faster than the competition, which is lagging behind, they will remain as the primary platform for most paid search budgets.
Recently Ask.com has relaunched their search engine and returned to their branding, semantic search, answering questions users ask. With a purposeful effort to constantly improve becoming more noticeable over the past six months it may only be a matter of time before Ask starts eating into the search and advertising shares of it’s competitors. The question to be answered is “who’s share of search traffic will ask.com eat into?”
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When trying to decide what ad copy is most effective in moving a viewer to a click, to a conversion each step of the equation offers it’s unique input into what drives a viewer of an ad to convert.
Step 1: Impression to Click
The almighty click through rate, CTR, has been regarded by pay per click marketers across the industry as the primary focus of PPC performance. Since this metric supposedly weighs heavy in the computation of the AdWords quality score it seems many marketers have no problem driving up high click through traffic even if it does not convert.
Impression to click is really the least important factor in determining the success of the bottom line of the purpose of the campaign, to convert visitors to clients. CTR is most useful when determining the strength of headlines, but becomes less useful when testing description text and display url’s.
Step 2: Click to Conversion
Conversion rate is a metric many pay per click marketers just felt they didn’t need to pay attention to. When I first began researching and managing PPC accounts I was contracting for an agency in Boulder, CO and was told not to worry about conversions, that was the job of the Web team. The idea was that it was my job to get the people there and their job to make them convert. What happened is a lot of traffic that was generated was not even qualified, much less actually going to convert. Disconnected data led to bad results.
By taking an integrated approach to Interactive design, Creative content, and Search marketing an environment is created in which departments consult with each other about the data collected and collaborate on implementing the best solution.
First, the importance of setting a baseline for when there is enough data to do the analysis is necessary. I draw the line at a thousand search network impressions. It is important to draw this line in the sand and stick to it. By knowing I have adequate quality data to analyze I can be confident that the conclusions I draw will provide the optimizations needed to continue to improve performance.
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The blog post on TechCrunch about Intel filing a lawsuit against Intellife got me thinking about how the process for naming a company attempts to prevent confusion in the marketplace. In our office, we have a number of employees by the name of "Julie" and an employee by the name of "Julia," and this situation has the potential to create confusion. In order to prevent this, what if the process for naming a person was similar to the process for naming a company?
When naming a child, there currently are very few limitations to selecting the moniker. Parents have the right to choose a common, traditional name such as Mike and Mary or an uncommon name like Kyd or Apple. Parents don’t need to ensure that no one is already using the moniker. They don’t have to worry whether or not there will be confusion between two similar sounding names such as Aaron and Erin. They also don’t have to consider whether the child will stay within the state or whether they need to select a name that will work nationally – or internationally.
In the real world, once parents pick a name for their child, the name goes on the birth certificate and the process is complete. Parents don’t have to go through the United States Patent and Trademark Office to register the name, and they don’t have to wait months for the moniker to be officially trademarked. They also don’t need to get lawyers involved in the naming process. In fact, the cost of hiring a lawyer would likely prevent many parents from even giving their child a name. Talk about confusion!
It’s a good thing naming a child is nothing like naming a company.
Monica Wasiljew, Manager, Brand Strategy & Research
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Most people would agree that creative, pie-in-the-sky types are
right-brained individuals, while left-brainers make fantastic
number-crunchers. I’ve always been on board with that, too. In a somewhat
pensive state I put two and two together and realized that a person with a
dominant right brain is actually left-handed. I had never questioned my
right-handed status until now. For all practical purposes I should be using
my left hand…after all, I’m a CREATIVE Director, not an accountant.
The right brain is intuitive, holistic, subjective, random (a person capable
of dreaming up some really outlandish stuff). “My side” is logical,
sequential, rational and probably spends a great deal of time over analyzing
things (guilty). In thinking it over, I’ve settled on this; the right brain
doesn’t work alone to generate creative.
After looking into some scientific studies, it turns out that I’ve actually
been putting the right side of my brain through strength training for a
number of years. The creative process itself (holding attention span,
visualizing spaces, exploring color, etc) is like high-impact aerobics for
the brain’s right hemisphere. So I get the best of both worlds–my whole
brain.
I’m a right-handed Creative Director! I’m time-conscious, budget-conscious
and rarely unconscious because my left-brain positive emotions dominate. I
over-analyze to be sure that a good idea truly is a good idea and because
I’m so rational, I can usually determine the most efficient ways to get
things done. And because I’ve worked the right side hard, it rewards me time
to time with some wild ideas.
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Campaign after campaign we look to take our reporting data on creative effectiveness and apply it to improving future campaign creative. We look at CTR, the landing page conversions data, and the actions taken by the visitors once they land on the landing page. It becomes clear that the traditional 20 – 30k banner ads simply aren’t as effective as a banner ad with more file weight. This brings me to the question of why publishers are not working to increase the maximum file sizes they allow. I recently sent a link to the IAB.net, which lists the recommended maximum initial download to be 40k for standard ad sizes to the publishers I work with regularly. Surprisingly, a number do not accept sizes higher than 30k. If publishers are not willing to invest in improving their ad servers, I wonder how long they expect to receive advertising dollars when it is just as easy to work with a similar publisher?
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Something about hearing that just made me think about it, does it really matter? I have to be honest, I would consider myself neither a PC guy or a Mac guy. I made the decision to just use both. When I first bought a computer I bought a PC, because I didn’t have the need in my eyes for what the Mac is really best at: being creative. Many times did I go to try to edit video on my PC only to get frustrated with the bad rendering when I was done. Long did I dream of the day I would have a Mac to really express myself on. Now that I have one to use, I find myself bringing my PC to the office so I can actually use Excel to it’s fullest without the spinning wheel of color I often see on the Mac.
The point is that although, as seen in the commercial, PC’s dominate much of the computing landscape there are still some things best done on a Mac. Apple really has differentiated themselves and carefully chosen the hill upon which they stand. Whenever I begin to design the strategy for a new paid search marketing campaign the first question I ask is what sets the client apart from the herd, what does their brand signify, how are they aligned. Without understanding how search marketing fits into the media mix and how it aligns with the brand image a campaign can be optimized for 8 hours a day and still not produce the same results as a properly integrated paid search marketing campaign.
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It wasn’t so long ago that car manufacturers were some of the only companies experimenting with video on the web. It made perfect sense for them. Re-cut and re-purpose existing tv footage to bring pulse-pounding motion online. Any expense that came as a result of editing or programming was justified because of the product’s high-ticket price tag. But with the rise of rich media, faster internet speeds and more affordable production techniques, video became a popular medium across the board. From entertaining tv spots to informative product demos to mini-movies, just about any type of video can find a home online and be an asset to your overall marketing program.
Videos can be developed and produced as a series to maximize budget and keep your audience coming back. The segments can live on your existing site to support content or illustrate a point. We recently developed several videos for a client, a global manufacturer of belt conveyor systems. Live action combined with 3D animation allowed us to show what the camera couldn’t see, making it easy for their customers to visualize exactly how the products work. Videos were translated in various languages for use around the world. For another Movéo client, the nation’s leader in aerial lifts, we shot a series of video testimonials. Sprinkled throughout the client’s site, these real-life customer stories work to reinforce the company’s message of reliability.
Well done, video works to bridge the gap between information and entertainment, making it easy and enjoyable to get your message across.
Angela Costanzi, Director Creative Services
