Whenever a company publishes research that casts its own products in a positive light, my sceptic-alarm goes off. Often this type of ‘research’ is just poorly veiled PR spin disguised as a scientific study.
There are some exceptions fortunately, and Google is one of them. For all the criticism I often levy against the big G, I have to admit that their computer scientists regularly come up with some fascinating stuff. (more…)
First up, an apology. This is less of a informative post and more of an open-ended question to all marketers, and not necessarily for just those that focus on online or search marketing. I’m looking at brand, budget, media and ROI. And testing. Lots of testing.
Being an SEO at OMD, a full service media agency born from a purely offline media buying and planning service, for the past 11 months has been an eye-opening experience. Only half the people in the agency work in “digital”, so getting down on a campaign level as far as ”search” or even more granualar “SEO” can be tricky. I hold my hands up, I understand next to nothing about how offline or “above the line” marketing works. It’s too easy to become siloed and work almost completely separately. You get so used to assuming that my link building has no relation to their outdoor advertising that integration is something that needs hard hard work, daily hard work, in order to make it happen. (more…)
This session covered the best practises for the display network and was presented by Biren Kalaria from Google.
Reach consumers at scale through YouTube, Blogger, DoubleClick and various publisher networks. Use Ad Planner to optimise these opportunities.
Google reaches 79% of the Europe population in the display network. There are typically 501 ad exposures per user per month. Average CTR is 0.07% on display whereas GDN text receives is closer to 0.37% when contextually targeted. Contextual targeting of text ads achieves good CTR across most verticals. CPCs are typically very low. (more…)
Google Panda update – communicated as an algorithm update designed to de-prioritise sites that were deemed to be low on user trust, sites that lack original non-commercial content, and sites that create, or copy content as something to chuff around commercial content. Live end of February in the US and rolling out to the UK April 11th/12th with seemingly a major target in the crosshairs – that being the price comparison sector.
Says who?
Well SearchMetrics, and Sistrix, in their “visibility” analysis which was neatly summarised on Holistic Search (more on “visibility” later). However I have my doubts as to the true business impact to the price comparison sector, having worked closely with many of the sites reportedly affected. In addition whilst there’s a lot of popular media coverage about the 94% drop in “search visibility” reported for Ciao; there’s yet to be a formal statement from Ciao themselves. Plus eHow owners Demand Media; in a statement issued yesterday are keen to point out some cautions about the measured data… (more…)
Last week at SMX Munich I spoke in a session called “First Mover Advantage or Living on the Edge”. The people from Rising Media asked me to update the audience on the new features in Adwords, but does that really have to do with the session’s subject? Just some thoughts about it….
(more…)
Things are merging more and more in Google. We have Universal Search and within the Ads we already had display off course. And in the past year Google has launched many new ad formats. Now Google ads another very important new format into the ads: video. So called “Media Ads” will be appearing in the paid ads. Simply speaking we will see videos.
You will see a video player in the results which will expand when you click it. The video ad will then take over the Google search page and play.
The new way of ads is not like Video Extensions, which Google has had longer. Where Video Extensions attaches a video player to the Adwords as, Media Ads is a “standalone format designed to put your videos front and center.” In other words: you are throwing the videos in the face of the searchers. (more…)
My last session of the day features a panel of Dave Naylor from Bronco, Bill Hunt from Back Azimuth Consulting and Jonathan Beeston from Efficient Frontier battling it out in a head-to-head over the age old debate: Which search marketing tactic is the most cost effective, PPC or SEO? Moderating the battle is Jon Myers from Yahoo!.
First up is Bill, setting the scene on PPC vs SEO. Why can’t we all just get along? is Bill’s first question. So first things – collaboration or cannibalisation? If you have both the top PPC and top organic result, what should we do? Is it working for that company? (more…)
Google and Ireland are stirring things up lately. The bad Irish economy made Google and other tech companies stand up to any possible tax increases, but Google in Ireland is making another drastic and remarkable move: in 2011 dedicated account management Adwords support for agencies will be stopped.
The story, broken by Accuracast and also pushed on by Searchenginewatch, is remarkable because Google apparently is stepping away from the personal support they were offering and still are offering in the US. (more…)
This post is written by Thomas Hertkorn of Ads2people who is guest blogging for us on SES Berlin 2010. Keep an eye on his posts!
Speakers: Richard Zwicky Founder, Enquisite / Eightfold Logic, Metamend; Steffen Methling Key Account Manager bei der etracker GmbH
At the Beginning Richard Zwicky talked about how to extract real value from Analytics.
His first statement was that all Analytics Tools are good for some tasks. But all Analytics Tools claim to be the best. He said in the end only the good interpretation of the Analytics Data is important. It is necessary to give the right information, to the right people. What does the customer really care? Anyone who does Analytics should answer this question.
(more…)
This post is written by Thomas Hertkorn of Ads2people who is guest blogging for us on SES Berlin 2010. Keep an eye on his posts!
Speakers on this panel were Jan Brockmann Senior Account Manager, metapeople ; Sebastian Reischel Director Client Manager, Blue Summit Media; Lorenz Wacker Managing Director Search & Social Media,j jaron
Moderated by Thomas Bindl
At the Beginning Jan Brockman shows the individual strength of search funnels. Search Funnels show the path users search. Normally searches going from unspecific terms to specific ones. For example a search starts with “Hotel” and ends up with “Cheap Hotel Barcelona”. If you’re analyzing search funnels you would now increase bids on hotel to be visible. The danger is to bid on generic phrases with a too low cost per conversation value. Search funnels going to be criticized as just another way to get more Budget from your customers. (more…)
When Google rolled out Instant Search only a bit over a month ago (feels like its been there forever doesn’t it?) the first reaction of some was that it meant “the death of SEO”, which was rubbish. The second reaction was that it was “the death of PPC”. Which made more sense, but also was said too quickly. Now it turns out that it was rubbish also, Instant is not costing advertisers money, its making advertisers money!
That is at least if we can believe a research performed by Marin Software, one of the larger managers of advertiser spending on search engines. They noticed that the number of times their advertisers showed up in Google grew by 9% and the clicks on those ads grew with 5%. This lead to an increase of 2% in spending on ads. Which makes both advertisers and thus Google as big winners of the launch of Google Instant. (more…)
Stay up to date with the latest articles