Written By Noah Mallin | July 14, 2008 | Share This |

The Police

Once again, Reprise Media’s SVP of Business Development Dan Kashman comes through with a great article on a Monday morning. This time its AdAge’s Abbey Klaassen earning accolades around our office for her insightful take on the impact of quality score and its effect on Hollywood. She argues that because each film they market is a discrete short-term campaign and usually revolves around high volume keywords like “Angelina Jolie” or “Jack Black,” the cost for those keywords is often prohibitive.

The key here is that the campaigns are relatively short-term and the search engines see each one as new. Google doesn’t want to completely shut out newbies from marketing over their platform so they have tried to fine tune their quality score to give weight to things like the relationship between the landing page and the keyword – in other words how relevant is the page the ad is leading the user to, and how rich is the information contained there.

Let’s say you are the local Public Television station. The legendary band The Police have agreed to make their last reunion concert a benefit for you, as they are doing for New York’s PBS stations WNET/WLIW this August. If WNET decided to mount a paid search campaign the obvious keywords from the get-go are variations on The Police, but they might have to pay a few dollars for each click on such a popular term. A quick Google search on the terms “The Police” and “New York” bring sites like clickticket.com in organic results and stubhub.com, ticketsnow.com and ticketspot.com as paid results. Narrowing it by adding the venue name brings a slew of paid and organic results from Madison Square Garden.

To drive down the bidding cost before the auction begins, WNET should have a super-relevant and well-optimized page on their website to funnel ticket-buyers to. The landing page should have specific information on the venue, the date, the band and ticket purchasing options. They would also want to make sure that the other search terms they bid on helped to pre-qualify searchers so that they were targeted properly – good keyword research goes a long way. Rather than getting results for people looking for the New York State Police keywords like “last concert” and “benefit” or “reunion” help to target the right audience.

Search marketing firms can have an added advantage in lowering the initial bid price. One of the factors that Google takes into account for quality scoring is the user’s account history – have they placed an ad on the network before, how often, and how relevant were they? An established search marketing firm like Reprise Media that’s been around for awhile will automatically give you a leg up on lowering your bid costs.

With all of the upfront challenges in managing bid price WNET might ask: why use search? For a campaign like this one search has a number of major benefits. WNET is going to benefit financially from the concert but they may want to reach a broader pool of donors who won’t be able to afford the tickets but still want to support public television. For those that do buy the tickets, using search to direct them to the WNET site rather than letting them find their way to Ticketmaster or Madison Square Garden supplies a rich source of data on the ticket buyers. This data can be used to help raise money for the station in the future or even to guide future programming decisions.

Topics: Google, Google: AdWords, Reprise Media, SEM: Bid Management, SEM: Paid Search, Search: How-To |