Introducing “Google Panic”
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Written By Brian Hemhauser | March 19, 2010 | Share This
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Ever been following your favorite team, it’s late in the year and they’re way ahead in the standings? They could cruise the rest of the way and be just fine. Then they have small hiccup, nothing major. But suddenly, they stress out and tense up. They start to think of how embarrassing it would be to blow such a large lead. In fact, they become consumed by the thought of it. Ultimately, the team that has nothing to worry about is tenser than anyone else. Finally, they collapse, all stemming from the pressure of not having any pressure.
(Let’s pause here while Met fans violently smash the palm of their hand into their forehead…ok, moving on.)
Is this type of epic collapse possible in the world of search? Over the last year, we’ve seen the launch of Bing (and over $100M to advertise it) accompanied by a partnership between Microsoft and Yahoo. The Search Engine Wars haven’t been this intense since Dogpile took a dump on the Hotbot. But let’s be honest, there still isn’t much of a fight here. Google still owns nearly three quarters of the market share in search. They are just cruising along, way ahead of the pack…right?
Topics: Google | No Comments »
Top 5 Cross-Channel Lessons Learned from the Super Bowl
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Written By Anthony Iaffaldano | February 11, 2010 | Share This
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On Monday morning, we released our 6th Annual Search Marketing Scorecard on the Super Bowl.
Unlike the USAToday AdMeter, YouTube’s AdBlitz or most other Super Bowl ad rankings, we focus on just about everything relating to a marketer’s campaign OTHER than the quality of their creative.
Instead, our Scorecard ranks Super Bowl advertisers based on their visibility in search and social media immediately after their TV spots aired. Essentially, we’re evaluating the steps each brand took to capture the demand created by their Super Bowl advertising investment.
So what were some of the biggest takeaways from the big game?
No Rookie Mistakes Here: Among the top-rated brands in our scorecard were three first-time Super Bowl advertisers – Boost Mobile, HomeAway and Google. All three brands turned compelling TV ads into meaningful online experiences. The brands were highly visible across the major search engines, and met interested consumers’ interest with content that easily extended the value of their TV commercials.
Advertising – Now With More Tailgating!: As any football fan will tell you, one of the best parts of going to a game isn’t the game itself, but the party leading up to it. So why should it be any different for the advertisers? 37% of the advertisers in this year’s game launched initiatives weeks and, in some cases, even months before the Super Bowl, building buzz and anticipation for their spots.
This is a significant shift in the way brands view the big game, one that’s taken place over the last few years. Super Bowl Sunday used to be about the big reveal – new spots were guarded more carefully than the president’s nuclear football. But in the age of social media, brands are finding benefits in opening the kimono a little early, not only showing consumers what they’re in for, but actually giving them the playbook and letting them lead the drive. The best example? Doritos’ incredibly successful Crash the Super Bowl promotion, which let consumers develop (and promote) their own spots, with the top three getting Super Bowl airtime. This not only cut down on Doritos’ production budget, but gave them an army of marketers all jockeying to earn :30 of worldwide fame.
Where’s the Brand Investment?: For the first time in five years, we saw a significant decrease in the number of companies visible in paid search for their brand names. (63% down from a high of 70%). While marketers have often struggled with the question of whether or not to buy their brand on search engines, it should be a no-brainer on Super Sunday. Only paid search offers the ability to control the message shows to consumers, allowing better integration with a short-term promotion like, say, the Super Bowl. This was most certainly a trend we expected to see heading in the other direction.
Social Took a Back Seat: Many pundits (including the one on the other end of this keyboard) expected this year’s Super Bowl to act as a coming out party of sorts in the way that mainstream marketers used social media during the game. We expected brands to end every commercial with breathless pleas to “Fan us on Facebook!” or “Follow us on Twitter!” We expected those channels to be literally buzzing at game time, with special offers for consumers, and for brands to loosen their controls and engage in real conversations with their customers.
And what did we get?
Well, to be fair, there were a few marketers thinking outside the box – For instance, Google drove viewers directly to YouTube, and E*Trade included Facebook & YouTube widgets on the end card of their commercial. Unfortunately, for most of the field, it was more of the same. 91% of the 57 brands we tracked had a presence on at least one of Facebook, YouTube or Twitter, but the conversation on those channels was fairly typical and one-sided: “Hey everybody, watch our ads! We’re proud of them!” Still plenty room for improvement.
No Commercial? No Problem! – There are only so many brands with $2.5 million sitting around to spend on a Super Bowl spot, but the buzz and interest generated by those spots isn’t only the domain of Big Game advertisers. Take tax prep-software TurboTax – given the timing of the Super Bowl, they knew that the Super Bowl would drive millions of people to the search box looking for information relating to the game, players, halftime performers and advertisers.
As a result, the company was extremely aggressive in paid search, with a campaign reminding consumers of the benefits of their package. While they didn’t explicitly say the words Super Bowl or even football, the landing page had football personality Chris Berman and a “tax coach of the year” trophy that looks awfully familiar.
In all, a savvy move to build awareness for their service in an unobtrusive (albeit not entirely relevant) way.
Want even more information about how brands fared in this year’s cross-channel marketing showdown? Register today to reserve your place at Reprise Media’s annual Super Bowl webinar, which will be held next Friday, February 19th at 2PM EST.
Among the topics we’ll cover:
• An in-depth look at the winners and losers in search and social media buzz
• Innovative tactics for tapping into the post-bowl surge in interest
• Potential pitfalls that could keep your brand on the bench
Topics: Advertising: Offline, Advertising: Online, Search Marketing Scorecard | No Comments »
Social Media: Is Google Buzz More Than Just Hype?
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Written By Noah Mallin | February 11, 2010 | Share This
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Google has been known to launch products (hello Wave) that get a lot of initial hype but end up being curiosities at best in the hands of users. This is not to diminish the areas in which Google still holds strong - search and e-mail. So the unveiling of their new Buzz tool for Gmail users is being met with skepticism in some quarters even as it seems to hold out several promising features. Here’s the YouTube video from Google that discusses the product’s features.
Buzz is designed to allow Gmail users to tap into social media activity and updates from their existing social contacts, without leaving the popular e-mail platform.
Topics: Google, Media Convergence, Social Media | No Comments »
Which Brands Scored an Integrated Touchdown at Super Bowl 44?
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Written By Anthony Iaffaldano | February 8, 2010 | Share This
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This morning, Reprise Media released our 6th annual Search Marketing Scorecard on the Super Bowl, which ranks Super Bowl advertisers based on the level of integration between their television commercials and presence in search and social media –measuring how prepared each brand was to capture the demand created by their Super Bowl advertising investment. The Search Marketing Scorecard is the longest-running study of its kind.
The audience for this year’s Super Bowl was primed and ready for integrated campaigns. According to a recent comScore study, 1/3 of the 90 million people planning to watch the Super Bowl expected to log on to their computers during the game. Furthermore, One out of every ten viewers (or nearly 9 million people) were going to use their computers specifically to seek out advertiser websites. That sounds like an audience that’s not only interested in the ads, but interested in having real interactions with brands, which is what our study is all about.
So how did this year’s advertisers do?
This year’s scorecard (which can be viewed by clicking the thumbnail to the left) saw the crowning of three rookie advertisers, as Boost Mobile, HomeAway and Google scored integrated marketing touchdowns in their first Super Bowl outing. The spots were joined in the win column by multiple-time champion E*Trade.
EDITOR’S NOTE: While it didn’t factor into the scoring in any way, it also didn’t hurt that Boost Mobile (with their Tim & Eric directed remix of the Super Bowl Shuffle) and Home Away (with the triumphant return of the Griswolds!) had two of my favorite ads of the night.
Furthermore, Denny’s, which rated a Fumble last year during their Free Grand Slam Breakfast promotion, turned in a solid performance, which bumped them up a few levels to a First and Gold advertiser - room for improvement, but a marked improvement over last year when their website crashed due to a lack of server capacity on the night of the game. (Rule #1 of cross-channel integration… make sure you can handle it if your stuff goes TRULY viral). This year, the restaurateur’s screaming chicken-related landing pages loaded quickly, pointing users to more info about the hugely successful promotion.
On the opposite side of the spectrum, PopSecret/Diamond Nuts was hard to find on the night of the Super Bowl - surprising given their pre-game promotion about using search and social to connect their campaigns. They were joined in the Fumble category by Dockers, Dodge Charger and Intel.
We also saw the return of a strategy we like to refer to as ad drafting, where companies not participating in the Super Bowl pull a judo move, buying keywords relating to their competitors and using their own energy against them. The most egregious of these drafters? Turbo Tax, who seemed to be buying every single keyword related to the Super Bowl that we could think of. They were visible for most brand names, generic super bowl keywords and more. Honorable mention goes to Pepsi (who were buying Coke related terms), and both Monster & Careerbuilder, who once again bought each others’ brand names and taglines in an effort to poach resumes and job hunters from the super bowl market.
Want to know more about the best in integrated marketing campaigns from the Super Bowl? Stay tuned to this blog over the next few days, as we dig into more of the data around our analysis to provide some useful trends and best practices. We’ll also be sharing some data from our partners at Trendrr, who provided conversation monitoring for all Super Bowl adds over the past few weeks.
And don’t forget to sign up for our upcoming Super Bowl webinar, which will be held on Feb 19th at 2pm. We’ll review all the winners and losers from this year’s Big Game, and provide analysis on what actually happened with all that buzz once users went online.
What did you think? Did you see any campaigns that you thought did a particularly good job integrating their messages cross channel?
Topics: Advertising: Offline, Advertising: Online, Media Convergence, Online Video, Search Marketing Scorecard, Social Media | 1 Comment »
Google Product Extensions: Providing More Information and Relevancy
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Written By Yvonne Wong | January 25, 2010 | Share This
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In November, Google released a new AdWords product called Product Extensions that allows advertisers to enrich their Google AdWords ads with more specific and relevant information. With Product Extensions, an advertiser’s search ad will display with a plus box appended below, which can expand to show product images, titles, and prices that are relevant to the user’s search term. Below is an example of a Product Extensions ad run by Sephora on the keyword “sephora cosmetics”:
Product Extensions can be associated with specific keywords within your campaign, and you can specify which specific products are associated with each keyword/search query. Advertisers also have the option to allow Google to decide which product images show if “auto-targeting” is selected. Up to six images can display if your ad is in the top position; up to four can be displayed on the right side of the SERP.
Topics: Google, Google: AdWords | No Comments »
Personalized Results and Paid Search Are Not A Match
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Written By Emil Panzarino | January 19, 2010 | Share This
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Recently, I was doing some routine campaign QA for one of our clients when I ran into something that stopped me dead in my tracks. I was searching on Google for one of our automotive clients’ model names when, much to my dismay, I was shown a listing from a completely different ad group within the client’s account. The listing that should have shown had language that was specific to that car model’s name, but the one that did show was tailored for the more broader automotive brand name. I soon realized that the ad that was shown was from an ad group that historically had the most traffic volume of the account.
Now, I have been in the paid search industry for some time, and have seen this type of thing before. I’m well aware that there are vague explanations from engines about what “broad match” really means, and that the keyword could well have been matched against another in the account. But here’s the kicker: this keyword was on “exact match”. I quickly hit “F5″ to ensure it wasn’t just a glitch, but sure enough the same ad showed. I searched 4, 5, 6 more times, and each time the wrong ad came up. Finally, on my 7th search (We like to be thorough here at Reprise Media) the correct ad showed. My heartbeat slowed from a frenzy as the issue seemed to be fixed. Deciding this whole situation was probably just an anomaly, I closed the browser.
Topics: Google, Google: AdWords, SEM: Paid Search | 4 Comments »
China v Google Not About Free Speech
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Written By Mark Pilatowski | January 15, 2010 | Share This
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Google v China Free Speech was originally posted on SEO Manager Mark Pilatowski’s piloSEO blog. Mark agreed to allow us to post it on SearchViews and share it with our audience.
“Don’t be Evil”. It is fairly well known that Don’t be evil is Google’s informal corporate motto. It looks great and gives everyone that sees it a warm and fuzzy feeling that this huge corporation that essentially tracks everything you do online is like a friendly neighbor. Google still has a pretty good reputation as far as corporations go. Unlike Microsoft, the general public still seems to trust Google and truly believe that they are a force for good in the world. Those who have had direct experience with the Google borg, like online marketers, SEOs, AdSense, publishers, etc. have a much different view of Google than do most people. In my experience Google is no different than every other for profit corporation. They are neither good nor evil but they are solely focused on increasing their revenue and profits. That’s why they went to China and agreed to censor search results. They saw the opportunity that was available in China and felt that the free speech wasn’t as important as that extra money that the China market could add to their bottom line. Read the rest of this entry »
Topics: Google, International | No Comments »
Search and Social Media: Mom Power Drives Marketing Results
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Written By Ruth Nightengale | December 7, 2009 | Share This
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The fact that women are powerful is hardly news, but recent studies suggest that moms may very well represent the National Power Grid for the United States.
In a white paper published by Advertising Age, The Rise of the Real Mom, the Boston Consulting Group states that moms control $4.3 trillion of the $5.9 trillion U.S. consumer spending total, or 73% of household spend. The Shriver Report, issued in October, found that women are the major breadwinners in 40 percent of families. And just last week, Google released another study on moms they are calling Four Truths about Moms and Search, created in collaboration with BabyCenter and two different research vendors between October 16 and November 17 of this year.
Topics: Advertising: Online, SEM: Paid Search, SEO, Search: How-To, Search: News, Social Media | 5 Comments »
Mobile: What Marketers Need to Know About Google’s AdMob Deal
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Written By Noah Mallin | November 11, 2009 | Share This
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The rapid growth of mobile platforms this year has put to rest any doubt that digital marketers may have had about jumping in. The recent successful launch of Android coupled with the continued growth of iPhone sales (even as the recession continues) point clearly to a continuing transformation in the portability of the online experience for most Americans. Google’s deal to buy AdMob serves to reinforce this wisdom.
After all, it’s not just about AdMob’s ad-serving platform. So much of Google’s success in the world of search advertising has been built on the back of analytics - how they cull and act on data in-house and what they offer to advertisers and consumers as a benefit of service. There is no doubt that whether or not Google’s own mobile OS dominates, AdMob’s platform agnostic nature gives them directional insight into mobile as a whole.
Here are the basics that every marketer and advertiser should know:
Topics: Advertising: Online, Google, Mobile, Technology | 2 Comments »
Search and Social Media: Your Guide to Bing and Google on The Road to Social Media
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Written By Noah Mallin | October 29, 2009 | Share This
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This week’s article by yours truly in the Huffington Post asks if Google is turning it’s back on its core values by limiting social search to folks with both Google profiles and social media profiles. Earlier in the week, my colleague Mark Pilatowski wondered whether the engines would be able to deal with the spam factor inherent in real-time search.
Before diving into the implications of real time and social search integration to the biggest search engines (excluding YouTube), it’s important to know the basics and the background to what these new deals mean to marketers and the brands who love them. Presented below is everything marketers need to know about the Bing and Google social search deals.
Topics: Bing, Google, SEM: Paid Search, SEO, Search: Innovations, Search: News, Social Media, Twitter | 3 Comments »