Archive for the ‘Google Adwords’ Category

Leveraging Search Retargeting Data for Site Retargeting Campaigns

March 9th, 2012

If you’ve ever been to a site with ad placements that appear to be curiously tailored to your interests or recent search efforts, you are experiencing a form of behavioral targeting that is now commonly employed by online marketers known as search retargeting (note: this is something that up until 2010 didn’t exist in a widespread form).

We open this blog article with an explanation of search retargeting because there are still a good number of businesses (as well as individuals) who are unaware that search retargeting is a well-designed advertising practice that makes use of your search query results to trigger highly-targeted advertising on pages that you visit next. For example: if you Google “mortgage broker” and begin to see ads from mortgage firms showing up in ad placements on the sites you typically frequent, you’ve seen search retargeting in action. And, yes, you may occasionally feel that someone is looking over your shoulder and keeping notes on your search activity. It’s all true. As with all the best marketing practices since the dawn of marketing itself, search retargeting is planned, not at all a coincidence.

As an advertising and marketing tool, search retargeting is fairly brilliant. In this incredibly wired environment, where consumers are perched in front of their computers throughout the workday and glued to their mobile devices all during the rest of their waking hours, ad impressions are expected to be highly-relevant. When the 2011 global average time on site has dropped to about 64 seconds* (which is down by 0:26 from 2010), those old static web ads may be as irrelevant today as direct mail. As with everything on the web – as it appeals to searchers – relevancy is the key to successful content development and marketing.

But this blog isn’t necessarily about search retargeting by itself (although the media planners and search marketers here at Sweet Spot Marketing would approve). This article is about how to mine your search retargeting data and leverage that invaluable information in your site retargeting. Of course, site retargeting is a practice that targets browsers that have previously visited your website and places ads on third-party sites that invite that same user to re-visit your website. Much like search retargeting, site retargeting is also a clever marketing device but the key here is relevancy. The invitation for a consumer to re-visit your site – especially if you are a business that offers a number of different products and services – may not be strong enough to lure traffic in a typical site retargeting campaign. Imagine that you’re Microsoft – where searchers may visit the site for all manner of hardware and software products. A cleverly-designed site retargeting campaign will mine the search targeting data to see that Searcher-A came to the site through a Google search for “Kinect for Windows” and the subsequent site retargeting program will trigger Xbox product family creatives that utilize content and language tailored to both the Microsoft site and  Kinect for Windows (or gaming in general). As you can imagine, a site retargeting program that makes use of category-level information would be both highly relevant to the user as well as have a higher potential for superior click-through rates. On the flipside, an ad that merely suggested a visit to the Microsoft home page would be woefully insufficient and doomed to low click-through rates.

In the effort to leverage search retargeting data for site retargeting interests, a forward-thinking  web marketing planner should begin to approach your search retargeting data with an eye for category-level detail. Creative elements should be developed to make full use of this information. We’ve long-known that targeted advertising is successful advertising. Using search retargeting data for site retargeting interests is nothing more than a new way to leverage leading web technologies in that very same effort. The game is the same, but the landscape is evolving. In the coming months and years, anything else may be no more successful than direct mail or other spaghetti-at-the-wall marketing techniques.

If you’re interested in leveraging the power of search retargeting and site retargeting, the online marketing team at Sweet Spot Marketing is ready to help you make the most of your campaign.

 

* According to Google’s ongoing study of web browsing behavior, data published in 2011.

Tags: Ad Impressions, AdWords, CPC Ads, Display Ads, Google, search marketing, SEM
Posted in PPC, retargeting | No Comments

Google Picks up a Patent on Behavioral Quality Signals

December 9th, 2011

Human behavior is an interesting subject. Ask a behavioral psychologist or an FBI profiler what they can tell you about the people they routinely observe and you’ll get an answer that sounds something like “People are walking, talking volumes of information. The more they talk and act, the more we know about their behavior and the better we can predict where they’ll go and what they’ll do next.”

Evidently, Google knows this as well.

At the end of November, the folks from Mountain View, California picked up U.S. Patent #8065296 to automate and expedite the process of evaluating search results based on “observed” behavior and allowing Google to return a greater level of relevant search results. Since Google originally filed for the patent in 2004, it’s a fair assumption that this behavioral evaluation process is something that they’ve been working on for quite some time and it is highly likely that it will allow Google to also return advertising results in the same manner.

The reason for this patent? According to the documents filed at the USPTO, Google asserts that a better model for predicting likely search results is needed “because the amount of information on the web and the number of new users inexperienced at web searching are growing rapidly.”

Google goes on to explain. “It may be desirable to monitor the quality of the search results provided to users in order to notice general trends of improving or declining quality and to identify specific problems that might suddenly cause a drop in quality. Manual evaluation of search quality can be laborious and time consuming, typically allowing for a small number of searches and search results to be evaluated to determine overall quality of a search engine.”

So what are we talking about when we speak of behavioral quality signals? In short, behavioral signals are those signals generated by human interaction on the web. It sounds simple, but the patent document muddies the issue:

“A method comprising: providing items during a time period; and determining an indication of quality of the items provided during the time period using a time series model; and taking remedial measures when the indication of quality of the items is below an expectation, wherein the remedial measures comprise: automatically removing a modification associated with the providing; wherein the items include search results.”

To make this easy to understand, I’m going to give you a dead-simple example.

Let’s say your grocery store manager tells you where to find the high-fiber cereal down the massively-long aisle with all the cereal boxes. He stays on to watch you make your selection, noting as you pull one box off the shelf, quickly scan the package and stuff it back. He makes a mental note that you only spent about two seconds with the first box. He then observes you as you select another box of high-fiber cereal and spend a full two minutes reading the product information on the back of the box before putting it in your basket. Again, he makes a mental note and comes to the conclusion that, for a person such as yourself who wants high-fiber cereal, box two was a more favorable brand. Then he waits around the cereal aisle to see if anyone else fitting your description does the same. In the end, his hopes are to be able to move the preferred cereal boxes to a more high-profile location along the cereal box aisle, allowing high-fiber cereal enthusiasts to save a little time in their shopping.

Given the example, it’s easy to conclude that behavioral quality signals are a complex mechanism used to predict complex behavior. Every behavioral style is unique. Every search result is therefore unique. It’s well known that Google has been using panels of human testers to judge the quality of their search results and assess whether one algorithm tweak resulted in better or worse search results than another (and here they’re talking about measuring the quality of the search engine results pages – rather than an individual page). Bing, the big competitor on the block, also uses quality signals in ranking. But the human testing component is a laborious effort, not practical. The patent is for an automated process. If Google is looking to improve their speed to market, automation would be enormously helpful.

So why is Google jumping into the game only now? The answer: Remember, the patent for this process was applied for in 2004, so it’s been a long time coming. Google has been waiting on this patent for some time. For Google, it’s another tool to allow them to deliver more relevant search results than ever before. For web marketers and site owners, it’s a clarion call for quality content.

Tags: Behavioral Marketing, Display Ads
Posted in Google, Google Adwords, Google+, PPC | No Comments

10 Reasons Why PPC Advertising Beats Yellow Pages Every Time

November 21st, 2011

For the purposes of this article, the term “yellow pages” is meant to refer to any non-specific telephone directory of businesses that was commonly printed on yellow paper (of which there were many) and their present online assets.

There was once a time when the yellow pages reigned supreme. This was probably 20 years ago (in 1992), right about the time that Delphi began offering the first full Internet service to its customers, before AOL, Prodigy, and CompuServe came online. Back then, if your business wasn’t listed in the in the yellow pages you were effectively undetectable to your potential customers. But that was before the advent of the internet and the web as we know it. Before 14.27 billion indexed web pages. Before affordable, high-speed internet access for all. Before pay-per-click (PPC) advertising brought Google billions and billions in annual advertising revenues.

Interesting notes: Some print directory industry insiders have publicly stated that use of the yellow pages has declined in exact correlation with the adoption of high-speed internet access across the nation. Additionally, trending for yellow pages online directories is worse today than it was in 2004 (according to Google Trends).

Perhaps it is too easy to say that the days of paging through the phone book and pouring over ads for a plumber that makes after-hours service calls during a holiday weekend are over. Then again, who among us would go to all that trouble if the plumber we needed was just a click away?

As more and more homes became wired for lightning-fast access to search results and information, it is easy to assume that very few people would choose to trudge to the hall closet and pull out that thick book of yellow pages and spend half an hour looking through a mess of tiny listings for a plumber that suited their specific needs – especially not when Google can give you about 2,000 results for a local plumber in 0.21 seconds, as well as location information, service rankings and search ads with money-saving coupons.

In 2008, there was an article written by a marketing manager for one of the largest phone directory publishers in the nation, in which he stated that the yellow pages was only relevant to two population groups: the lower social-economic segment of society and the over 50 years of age market. He went on to suggest that the yellow pages was probably a valuable place to advertise if either of those two groups was a primary demographic for a business owner. Ouch.

Given the significant decline in printed directory usage, the old yellow pages publishers have moved their operations online – getting onboard with ads that run in both the print directory and their new online directories. Problem is: It’s hard to compete with Google search. The barriers to entry are now too high for a simple search directory to have any significant draw or lasting effect. With mobile devices the default search settings are set to use Google or BING. Thus, we can only assume the separation between  online directories and rise of major search engines is a trend that will continue as mobile usage increases.

So let’s look at the comparison to PPC advertising. What makes PPC advertising such a valuable asset to a business owner (of any size) when the yellow pages are calling?

  1. Targeting – PPC advertising enables you to target hundreds or even thousands of people looking specifically for businesses just like yours. By targeting people as they search, you’re reaching prospects who are ready to make a buying decision. You’re not buried in a three-pound book at the top of a hall closet or in an specific online directory under your competitors listings.
  2. Cost – PPC advertising allows the business owner to set their own budget. Simple as that. No more escalating “rate card charges” for annual placement in a book or online directory that fewer people are turning to each and every day. No costly online ad contracts.
  3. Tracking – PPC campaigns, married with FREE website analytics, will tell you how many clicks you received from your ad and what those visitors viewed on your website. Unless a caller tells you that they found your ad through the yellow pages, how would you ever know?
  4. Controlled Exposure – Want PPC ads to show in one part of town but not another? You can control exactly where your ads show through geo-targeting.
  5. Content that Changes – PPC ads, much like web content, is something that is quick and easy to change. How many times have you seen business ads with the wrong phone number, address or hours of operation? That kind of incorrect information can cost a business dozens of potential customers over the course of a year.
  6. No Contracts – Sweet Spot’s PPC management is month to month. With a yellow pages directory, a 6 month contract is typcial.
  7. Share of Voice – With a print or online directory, you’re competing with every other plumber who has a listing. With PPC ads, you compete only against those who are on the first page at Google.
  8. Market Share – A simple numbers game: All yellow pages properties combined probably represent about 2% of the total search market share. Google, BING and Yahoo control ~95% of the search market. Where are you going to put your marketing budget dollars?search-market-share
  9. Impressions – Your yellow pages directory sales representative will tell you that they have an extraordinary amount of impressions for their pages. Count how many individual listings are on that page and divide. Are those impressions for your area of the city specifically? Divide again. Try to get out of the CPM buying model. Calculate your expected Cost-Per-Click (CPC) for Yellow Pages, and you might find it to be twice (perhaps more) as high as your PPC costs.
  10. Transparency – With a PPC campaign, the business owner has the ability to track everything through reporting. This is important when factoring in PPC offered by the yellow page directory sites. They may want to drive the clicks you paid for to your business listing on their URL and not your actual site.

Tags: Ad Impressions, AdWords, Analytics, CPC Ads, Display Ads, Google, Reports, search marketing
Posted in Bing, Google, Google Adwords, Local Search, Mobile Marketing, PPC, SEO | No Comments

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