What Role Will Display Advertising Play In Your 2009 Marketing Plan?

November 24th, 2008

Many companies are slashing their marketing budgets and evaluating how marketing dollars are spent due to the tough economic times. Slashing budgets is a clear sign that “Lean and Mean” is the current theme for many businesses. On average most rese arch suggests that (while growing) online advertising still only represents less than 10% of where marketing dollars are spent. Yet even online advertising budgets are getting scrutinized.

For advertisers who wish to get the best ROI (Return On Investment) for their online marketing dollar the focus tends to shift to display advertising and whether or not they should keep spending in that category. We all know that display advertising (eg banner ads on websites bought on CPM or cost per thousand impressions) is typically the hardest online advertising initiative to measure. Comparatively, CPA (cost per acquisition) campaigns can be directly tied to ROI.

Therefore, when under pressure to justify every marketing dollar spent the inclination is to slash display advertising budgets and increase more accountable marketing channels such as affiliate marketing. At the surface this seems to make sense. However, if you take a holistic approach to looking at this situation you may find that display advertising plays an important role.

At NETexponent we have seen how display advertising can boost other online marketing efforts such as paid search and affiliate programs. We evaluate all marketing channels in order to get a holistic view of our clients’ online marketing effort. This outlook has shown us time and time again that spikes and dips in performance driven marketing channels such as search and affiliate can sometimes be directly related to display advertising efforts. When significant display advertising campaigns are running for clients we usually see a boost in traffic and conversions in other online marketing channels. Therefore, display advertising can play an important role even in ROI focused advertising efforts.

Measuring the impact of display advertising on other media channels and choosing the right allocation of marketing dollars is where the tricky part comes in to play. I am not advocating that all advertisers go out and boost display ad spending because it may not have the impact they want. It is true that even boosts in performance related to display could come at a price that is too high for advertisers. My main point is that companies should evaluate the impact display advertising has on other online campaigns and use that data to determine exactly how much spend to allocate to this channel in order to maximize online marketing ROI.

Posted in Display Advertising, Meet Us, NETexponent Clients, Online Marketing, Research by Peter Figueredo | | 3 Comments

Search-Based Keyword Tool Is Cool

November 20th, 2008

Right away, I’ll tell you that you should add the new Google Search-Based Keyword Tool to your go-to armory of keyword research solutions.

In a sort of Copernican way, the new Google keyword tool looks at what already exists on your site and pulls out relevant searchable keywords, which sets it apart from your average run-of-the-mill keyword list building tools.

What’s really cool about the search-based keyword tool is that it lets you sign into your AdWords account. Once you do this and enter a website into the word-box, it queries your current keyword mix and populates an extensive list of keywords that are not currently existent in your account. This is a great thing for marketers who have spent countless hours thinking, “Okay, I’m buying thousands of keywords, but what else am I missing?”

There’s also a small competitive advantage to the search based keyword tool, since it lets you enter any website. Even though it only returns 100 results if you are not signed into AdWords, that’s still 100 more competitive insights than you had before using it.

Posted in Online Marketing, Search Marketing, Testing/Optimization by Peter Figueredo | | 0 Comments

7 Minutes in SEM Heaven

November 19th, 2008

For those of you who are not search marketing experts yet, I’d like to share with you a few tips and some quick fixes that will improve your account and can be figured out in 7 minutes or less. Please note that these are more beginner tips. In addition, this applies directly to Google, but can also be used to help with other search engines like Yahoo and MSN. When you are done, you will feel like you’ve accomplished a lot and are in a nice happy place.

Heaven

Let’s focus on three key areas:

Campaign settings
Keyword match types
Keyword bid optimization

1. Campaign Settings

Check your campaign settings and ask yourself the following questions:

Are my geo-targeting settings correct? If you are selling a product that only ships within the United States, don’t target “All Countries and Locations.” I know it sounds simple, but I can’t tell you how many accounts I’ve seen that have wasted dollars on such a careless mistake.
Are my networks and bidding settings correct? Keep search and content separate…always. If one is checked, then other should not be. It’s a major money waster to not separate search and content campaigns. Refer to a more in-depth explanation in this blog post about Google Content Network Best Practices.
Is my daily budget big enough? Review the daily budgets of all your campaigns. It’s possible you might need to shift things around a bit. Your campaigns with the best conversion-driving keywords should get the most budget dollars allocated to them. You don’t want these campaigns turning off prematurely, because it could mean a huge loss in revenue.

2. Keyword Match Types

Ask yourself:

Which match types am I currently using? Which should I be using?

Think about your search terms. If you are only buying broad match keywords, you need to change this strategy right away. Ideally, you should do some keyword research and buy long-tail terms in both exact and phrase match. As a quick fix, however, you can copy and paste your entire keyword inventory into other match types in AdWords Editor. Buying multiple match types is a way of making your keyword mix more efficient, but be careful setting up the different bid amounts. If your broad match keyword bid is higher than your exact and phrase keywords, then it will be triggered and most likely have a higher average CPC. Also, if you are not using negative match keywords to block off irrelevant traffic, you are making a pretty big booboo as well. Learn more about match types.

3. Keyword Bid Optimization

Run a keyword report covering the last few months. Download the report into Excel, and look for 2 big things that might stand out:

High cost keywords – Sort keywords by cost and pick out any keywords that have not had conversions in the last few months but have spent a lot of money. For example, a keyword with $2,568 in spend and zero sales is a pretty good clue that it should be paused. If they have had a conversion or two but the cost per conversion is still pretty high, you might considering lowering the bid.
Low cost conversions – Look at the keywords with the most conversions and lowest cost. Are they in a high enough position? Can they be even higher? If the cost per conversion is really low, you might want to raise bids on these keywords for higher positions and see if it increases volume.

Posted in Online Marketing, Search Marketing, Testing/Optimization by Peter Figueredo | | 0 Comments

Even the Military Loves Social Networking

November 12th, 2008

In honor of Veteran’s Day (ok – I’m a day late) I’d like to give a round of applause to TroopTube.com, a YouTube-like site that connects soldiers with families and friends, keeping them up to date on the little things in life.

In addition to those serving our country, members not in the military can create an account as a civilian friend or family member and can easily upload and share videos. TroopTube does say that members have the option to share videos with everyone or only with a select few, but I couldn’t really tell how a member chooses who can view the video, or if a member can have “friends” to choose from.

The site is only in its Beta version and was created by Military OneSource, an authorized Department of Defense program that provides support to Active Duty, Guard, Reserve, and their families. There are few videos, but I am sure that is only because the site just launched.

I love how social networking has made its way into every nook of society and even the armed forces see its value. I just hope as the hunt to monetize social media continues TroopTube is left alone. It embodies the core values social networking started with – finding a way to connect when you’re not there. To me, a TroopTube member is going to the site for one purpose, most likely with limited time, and wouldn’t be interested in anything other than new videos from friends and families, so what’s the point to try and monetize if they can’t be easily distracted? We’ll see what happens…..

Posted in Online Marketing, Social Media by Erin M. | | 0 Comments

NETexponent Launches New Research Division AffiliateBenchmarks

November 12th, 2008

It gives me great pleasure to announce the launch of the newest division of NETexponent

Posted in Affiliate Marketing, Online Marketing, Research by Erica M. | | 1 Comments

Advertisers Tailor Messages To Address Economic Concerns

November 11th, 2008

This LA Times article was extremely interesting since it explores how different advertisers are tailoring their advertising messages to pitch value and savings during this harsh economic environment. Advertisers who have pitched themselves on platforms of luxury or convenience are now changing their tune since those qualities are valued less when money is tight. What is especially interesting is how luxury goods companies like BMW are changing their tune to promote value and savings while competitors like Mercedes are not. (Bad move, Mercedes.)

Even luxury brands are promoting value. The current ads for BMW’s dealer group, for example, focus less on performance and prestige and more on safety and savings. The campaign reminds potential buyers that BMW offers a four-year no-cost maintenance plan.

“The message we feel is most in line with the times is reminding people about our value-for-money equation,” said Shawn Ticehurt, BMW North America’s marketing and events communications manager.

The team at NETexponent brainstormed this very topic a few weeks ago during one of our townhall meetings. We discussed how our clients could tailor their marketing messages so they appeal to the current consumer mindset. The team came up with some great ideas and here are just a few:

iChapters.com offers students textbooks at a fraction of the cost- a key marketing message to be highlighted. They also offer immediate gratification since they are downloadable textbooks. Focusing more on the savings compared to print and less on the immediate gratification should prove helpful.
audible.com allows people to purchase downloadable audio books one at a time or through their subscription plans. The subscription plans allow consumers to purchase books at a significant savings off the cover price. This could prove to be a much greater value proposition than the convenience of the download or their vast selection of 50,000+ books.
The Financial Times newspaper provides great world news coverage, not just financial news as the name may lead you to believe. In this market more and more people are looking for news about the world abroad for financial and political reasons. It’s also great to get a world view on the US to see how others view us. FT’s messaging could benefit from a focus on this value proposition perhaps even more than a focus on price. Timely news with a world perspective is very important in this crazy environment.
Even The Wine Enthusiast can pitch themselves on value if they promote their clearance section more as well as selling their own brand of products which can be much cheaper than pricier alternatives.

I am sure that some of our affiliates can also find interesting ways to pitch our clients and I encourage everyone to think about how products and services can offer consumers value and/or savings.

Posted in NETexponent Clients, Online Marketing by Peter Figueredo | | 0 Comments

Google Quality Score Update – Will We Feel It?

November 7th, 2008

Probably not.

This week, Google announced a couple of changes to the algorithm of their magical quality score.

Position Normalizers – You know that saying, “The rich get richer?” Well, Google, right before withdrawing from their deal to form an advertising partnership with rival Yahoo! and from being subjected to the scrutiny of the anti-trust system, wanted to combat this aphorism by removing the ad position biases because of CTR. What does this mean? Ads in higher positions typically have high click-through rates because they have high positions and have high positions because they have high click-through rates. Google wants to remove the circular reasoning behind this and award truly high quality ads with distinguished positioning.
Top Ad Placements – This one is confusing. According to Google, ads get placed according to their ad rank. It’s possible that the highest ad rank has a low quality score, which disqualifies the ad from the top of the page (yellow slots), which in turn, causes there to be no ads at all in this slot. OK? Take it as it is. The bottom line is that Google now allows ads with a lower ad rank and higher quality score to jump to the top spot. Got it? Cool.

For the full spiel on what Google portends are the guidelines for running higher quality search and content campaigns with added efficiency, check out their answer page to: What is ‘quality score’ and how is it calculated?

Posted in Search Marketing by Peter Figueredo | | 0 Comments

Google Content Network Best Practices

November 3rd, 2008

From time to time, clients ask me if I think they should try advertising on the Google Content Network (GCN) as part of their search marketing program, saying they’re unsure if it’s worth spending money on low quality traffic. It’s true that people who see these ads are not actively searching for the product. On the other hand, how is this much different than reading an ad on a billboard?

Relevancy in advertising may have spoiled us a little but not enough to do away with the power of persuasion. So what I usually tell clients is, yes, it’s absolutely worth trying. Not only is it worth trying, but if one tries hard enough, there is a great deal of high quality traffic to be attained.

Main Reasons Advertisers Lose Money on the Google Content Network:

Ads appear on irrelevant pages, which lead to bad clicks, which lead to low conversion rates.
The language in the ad does not divert the user’s attention from site content.
Initial setup is wrong. A content campaign should be its own campaign (or account), separate from search campaigns.

To expound on this last point, you want it to be separate for bidding and budget efficiency and so you get a more accurate click-through rate (CTR) for your campaigns. Because the overall reach of the Google Content Network is so large, you’ll usually have a low CTR, and you don’t want this number skewing the direction of your regular search campaigns. Some say there’s an additional advantage to having Google Content Network as a separate account, because one important factor for quality score is the overall click-through rate (CTR) of the entire account, and CTR from the content network will obviously bring that down. On their help page with content network optimization tips, Google claims this isn’t true and says: “The performance of your ads on content pages does not affect their performance on Google or on the search network.”

Things You Should Know About Keywords:

Keywords in content ad groups need to describe the kinds of landing pages you want your ads to appear on.
The keyword list should be words that appear most frequently on the kinds of pages you want to target.
Use small tightly-themed ad groups with no more than 30-50 keywords. Even 10 keywords is fine.
Only broad match is taken into account; there’s no need for exact and phrase matches.
Keyword bids are irrelevant; bids go according to the ad group’s default (content) bid.
Negative keywords are important and can be used to block unwanted traffic.

Things You Should Know About Ads:

Ads need to distract users away from site content.
Try using more competitive language and use words like “Free” in your ads whenever you can.
Quality score for the Google Content Network is not as strict as regular search campaigns, so you can be more creative. Ads do not have to match keywords, though landing pages should still be relevant.
Magic ad positions in Google Content Network are 1-4 while in search, it’s more like 1-2 and sometimes 1-3.
Create separate ad groups for each media type in Google Content Network campaigns i.e. separate group for image ads.

Things You Should Know About Reporting:

Run Placement Performance reports – these give stats on what specific sites perform well or under-perform in your content campaign.
Use site exclusion to block sites on the Google Content Network that are costly and not performing well toward your goals.
Try using Site Exclusion Tool to block categories of sites i.e. parked domains – although it’s still possible to convert on these types of sites.
Run these reports every so often and try taking out the best sites and testing a site/placement targeting campaign.

A Great Tip When Running Site/Placement Targeting Campaigns:

The Google site-finder is a flawed tool that does not give you all the sites you could be using.
Right next to the link “Add Placements,” you’ll see another link, “Edit Placements and Bids.”
Click this link, and paste domains (you find on your own) into the box that didn’t appear when using the site-finding tool.

Try Using Demographic Targeting:

Most useful for sites that report demographic data, such as Youtube and Myspace.
Example of usage: You can set it so your bids will be 120% for ages 18-25 who are of the male gender.
Important: Using demographic targeting will not exclude other sites from displaying your ads; it just allows you to bid more/less for sites that have demographic features.

New Enhanced Site/Placement & Keyword Targeting Features:

Google now allows you to couple groups of keywords with site-targets.
In other words, you can choose sites you think will work well with your product, but can set it so ads will only show up if the keywords (or keyword mix) you chose are present on the page. This allows for additional targeting.

Whoever is reading this, I hope you find these tips helpful. Your comments, criticisms, along with any additional “tricks of the trade,” are all welcome.

Posted in Search Marketing, Testing/Optimization by Peter Figueredo | | 5 Comments