March 6th, 2008 admin
Okay, so i’ve calmed down slightly. We’ve had a lot of inhouse discussion here about the ramifications of the search box for brand, and what it means. How is google planning to use this?
One opinion here is that this is another attack similar to the November Florida changes in that it is an affiliate attack, and Google plans to reintroduce Froogle in the way that they did several years ago - directly involved in the search text. To quote my colleague exactly;
“My view is that they are ultimately trying to fill the first page of natural listings with these site search boxes for product searches, with the objective of adding maybe a tick box option where Google will compare the product being searched for on all participating sites thereby functioning as a comparison engine.”
Now, i’m not too sure on this one. Is this a mess that google really needs to get into? The ramifications of a censorship approach like this to increase their own products competitiveness is something that google is yet to do; although they could have done it years ago, and become incredibly powerful because of it.
Google blog has posted on the issue. They appear to be confirming what I thought the search feature would be used for. If someone searches for a big brand name, it is highly likely that they want to investigate further into the page. Therefore; it’s googles discretion whether or not to enable the feature for a site based on click through performance. Similar to the top spot occupation for ppc campaign - it only appears if your site is that relevant.
What does this mean moving forward? An extention away from brand term would probably be the next logical step. If a natural listing gets an incredibly high click through rate on a generic search - why not add an additional search box due to its relevancy? This will eventually be the holy grail of generic search results, if it is rolled out to generic terms.
How about placing this feature on extremely high click through rate performing ppc adverts? I don’t think this will happen, but it would make things very very interesting in the future..
Google IS willing to mess with the natural listing display.
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March 6th, 2008 admin
So, the natural listings in google have another google search box now, when you search for brand term. A quick search for Wikipedia will show the search box appearing. However this search box only appears when the site is ranking first (and possibly only for brand); is this a sitemap option..?
It is currently running for Wikipedia, John Lewis, Amazon and probably hundreds more.
Try it for yourself; google search for wikipedia.
Edit- Upon further examination, it is only appearing for brand term searches for major retailer & large companies (microsoft, tesco.. etc)
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March 4th, 2008 admin
I have worked in pay per click for several years, for several companies. One thing that I have always noticed occuring somewhat secretly in the background is forms and methods of client reporting fraud. The severity of some of which, if brought to light, would have guaranteed the clients swift exiting from the agency in question.
An example of this fraud being:
One client, two products advertised. One product over spends, performs very poorly. Other product performs well, under spends. The agency balanced the books so both products appeared to have average months. Additionally, several conversions were falsified.
The reason I bring this up is that Search is without doubt the most directly trackable and transparent way of spending a marketing budget. It rejects typical old marketing paradigms such as the old “flushing of half the budget”. Clearly this extra transparency removes a large safety blanket which is recovered by a layer of deniability when it comes to reporting and invoicing.
When I explained to a friend of mine (a high end solicitor) some of the invoicing processes that I have seen fraudulently completed, his head spun - and he quickly informed me just how illegal this kind of white collar fraud is. I imagine it probably happens somewhere in the PPC world on a daily basis.
So what is the future for this kind of situation? How does it get stamped out from a client point of view?
- One option is for the clients to demand their own tracking solution, a correctly installed and configured Searchware 4 (bidbuddy) tracking solution can be completed transparent. It can be manipulated easily however.
- Whilst meeting your SE Agency, ask them to generate a monthly report from Google, Yahoo, MSN etc during the meeting and compare it with your formal report/invoiced figures.
- Ensure you have reporting access to the accounts that you pay for, this option is available on all engines. Your agency should not have a problem with supplying you with this although they will grumble.
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February 5th, 2008 admin
Here’s a simple technique that some people are unaware of, but it can be useful. This is particularly important for gambling PPC accounts, as they run the vast majority of their spend on Yahoo due to restrictive bidding within Google.
If you have a strong performing brand term, the click through rate should be between 25% to 50%. This will ensure a quality score of five. If for example, your main converting term is “casino online”, you can make a significant reduction on your top term by transferring the keyword into the brand term group. Because the quality score is on an ad group level, your CPC will be temporarily slashed for the advert.
The expensive term will slowly drag down the brand term quality score, so it’s important to load the brand term ad group with plenty of duplicate ads so you can cycle them making the CPC slash work for a longer period.
This is an excellent strategy for high converting, low volume terms that have extremely competitive cpcs.
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February 4th, 2008 admin
Ad text is one of those things that some people involved in search get extremely focused on. You can either write compelling ad text or you can’t, it’s a difficult art to squeeze the best performance out of so few words. I’ve found that literary devices such as alliteration and rhyming led to small, barely noticeable increases in click-through rate whilst calls to action can lead to slightly larger ones. This small changes are probably due to the psychology of reading ad text, firstly the user reads the strap line, then scans the destination URL for a recognisable brand name.
When I started working in PPC, I was taught a few “golden” rules. One of these is that dynamic keyword insertion is good and would lead to higher performance through better click through rates. More bold is better, I was told. I never bothered to put this to the test until a rather large account landed on my doorstep - thousands of ad groups, hundreds of thousands of keywords. By taking a selection of the best performing and highest trafficked terms, I isolated them into a single ad group and created five ads -
1. Control advert, the same in every ad group.
2 & 3. Advert with dynamic keyword insertion, with default keyword text as the same as 4 & 5.
4 & 5. Full copy ad text, no keyword insertion.
My findings were fairly interesting, generally the control advert performed in the middle. With similar click through rates across the board although not great, as the advert was highly generic basically discussing brand term rather than product keyword. The full copy ad text performed the best - significantly higher click through rates than either 1 2 or 3 across the board. The adverts that used dynamic keyword insertion performed the worst.
Now clearly it is possible that my dynamic adverts were set up poorly, but further investigation analyzing the search terms showed there were fairly optimized. There are presently no figures in this entry as I don’t have the data with me; however I will repeat the experiment over the course of a weekend during March and post the results here. I plan to run similar tests using literary devices over the coming weeks in order to pull together some numbers for them and see how they perform compared with the “golden rules” that I was taught originally.
If anyone has similar or opposite findings - please don’t hesitate to let me know.
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February 3rd, 2008 sam
Do you remember the days of Yahoo’s overture system - they weren’t great. Hey, Panama isn’t perfect as, for example, it lacks a good negative keyword control within the interface, and ad-text is adgroup specific rather than keyword specific as in adwords. But realistically, Panama was a huge step forward from the overture dinosaur.
So what does the MRC switch mean in real terms? Well, currently Yahoo controls search advertising on Orange, T-mobile , 3 and in the future O2. When Yahoo originally pitched the MRC platform to me, they were basically selling it as a brand awareness tool rather than a means of actual conversion. If you have a brand domination of PPC in websearch, then a mobile advertising campaign was almost a necessity. However, looking at the results for certain verticals such as gambling and phone related products, conversion rates have been exellent - far better than the search equivalents. I imagine this is due to the low volume of searches, they are more targeted and more likely to lead to sales. This will decrease in time and eventually the conversion rates will probably drop significantly.
The coming panama changes mean a lot. For example; accessibility to the mobile advertising platform will become more widespread. Currently you need to spend a certain monthly budget just to be considered for the MRC platform. With this increased uptake will come more competition and the margins will shrink. However, most people within the industry are just not aware of how powerful mobile advertising is right now - and just how competitive it will be. The potential for niche is fairly small, although buzzwords and spelling mistakes will be even more important in mobile than they are on search. This will make it a requirement to be in touch with different advertising cultures and groups in order to carve out a realistic return.
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February 2nd, 2008 admin
So the news is that Microsoft are tabling an offer for Yahoo - valued at around £20bn. What could this mean for search in general? Within the United Kingdom, probably very little. The google struggle that microsoft would face post merger would still be something of a David & Goliath struggle - around 15% vs. 85% market share (off the top of my head).
I does make me shudder to thank of the changes that the merger would bring, particularly to the paid search wings of Yahoo as the Microsoft software is so incredibly poor.
We shall see what happens. I personally don’t think they will accept the buyout, but time shall tell.
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February 2nd, 2008 admin
Just a short post to note that unfortunately, Firefox v3b is not compatible with the Panama frontend. It also crashed a lot and is not recommended whatsoever. It doesn’t seem to handle ajax particularly well although the tabbed browsing does seem more efficient. Currently it’s something to avoid if you work in PPC.
Firefox v2.x.x however is an excellent browser and highly recommended!
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February 2nd, 2008 sam
Goodbye “The Search Works” and welcome to Tradedoubler, which is best known for it’s affiliate program management. The tracking solution was probably bought out as a solution to make the affiliate network more competitive, it has been falling behind in its performance in recent years - it has recently lost a large number of big clients.
I’m personally not the biggest fan of bid buddy, the introduction of the big launch of Searchware 4, their latest build, was not the most encouraging launch due to the fact that uh.. nothing changed? Basically they changed a few layouts, and completely changed the display. But was anything positive actually achieved - no, not really. They achieved confusion across the board really.
I can’t be overly critical of The Search Works (now Tradedoubler), both companies have actually always impressed me with their personnel who have always been quick to help and have excellent communciation skills. The training from TSW was clear, and they were always keen to help. I’ve had similar treatment from Tradedoubler who have, again, been quick to contact me and help me.
I wonder if the TSW redirects will have to be replaced with new TD redirects from another domain, if so, that could prove havoc for agencies that use bidbuddy. Over the coming weeks, i’ll post a comparison between Bid Buddy and Atlas - including their charging systems as i’m quite interested in them.
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February 1st, 2008 sam
Mobility is the future of search. In my experience, there seems to be two camps of thought right now when it comes to the future of the internet and hence - search. I am however strictly of the opinion that the future is clearly mobility. I have not made that argument lightly however, I planned to specialise in this corner of search personally, but the alternatives do not appeal to me anywhere as much after viewing some of the performance statistics of the mobile campaigns.
One camp argues that the future of search marketing and the internet in general is a merging with television. I can see this happening to a certain extent, although the strength of search from the television I believe to be negligable. Entertainment will make the shift to a digital distribution, in the form of pay per view high definition video, free view (youtube style) steaming video and straight downloadable free and subscriber content. It is not a question of if but of when, for many - this is already happening with technology such as xbox media center, PVR and divx multimedia players. The internet and television have been linked to some extent, directly, for sometime. Certain betting services have seen reasonable return with interactive television services - but they never really achieved market saturation. I’m unsure as to how search will operate within the realm of the television screen, mainly because I think it is crippled without a full keyboard.
Mobile phones suffer from the same problem as the television, they have a limited text entry due to the predictive text constraints. Most people are unlikely to entire more than a single word, which will make competition for the search platform extremely competitive. I do still believe, however, that the future is mobile. Even in, what is definitely still its infancy, mobile phone campaigns for certain economic verticals on the Yahoo mobile beta platform (MRC) see in excess of 20% conversion rates. Once people become more aware of these numbers, then the market will slowly become more and more saturated and much more competitive. However, due to the restrictions of the beta platform at present the competition is extremely low - so get in there now if you can.
Imagine walking into a shop and trying on a pair of shoes, they fit perfectly and you’re about to buy. Just before you do you key into Google the barcode or make and model and find the size and make for sale online for 20% cheaper. In my opinion, that will be the next type of online affiliate website, in the same vein as the current spattering of ‘coupon’ websites.
So, which are the big keywords currently? Well - mobile advertising currently appears to be mimicking the early state of paid search particularly from the overture platform. Adult and gambling content are the current big hitters - but this will change. Mobile related content performs extremely well in my experience, although the volumes are not particularly high - around 50-60 sales a day at the most. This will grow though there is absolutely no doubt.
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