SEM: Ad Creative
Search News: Election ‘08 - Obama Uses Search Engine Marketing to Manage His Reputation Like a Pro
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Written By Andaiye Taylor | October 7, 2008 | Share This
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On the heels of a New York Times article on the subject, the McCain campaign over the weekend, primarily in the person of Governor Sarah Palin, eschewed talk about the ailing economy and instead talked up Senator Obama’s purported “palling around” with former Weather Underground member and Chicago area civic fixture William Ayers.
To their great credit, the Obama campaign launched a gold-star search engine marketing response to the attack, one that hit all of the best practices outlined in my previous post – and then some. In the evolution from a campaign that was phenomenal on social media but behind his opponent on search marketing to a campaign that is nimble and proactive we can see the basis for a first-class search reputation management campaign.
Search News: SMX East – Search Marketing Happiness is a Warm Churro
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Written By Noah Mallin | October 6, 2008 | Share This
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The Javits Center is a cruel place at 8:30 AM – especially when Search Marketing Expo East is sharing the cavernous steel and glass girdered barn on the far, far west side of Manhattan with a few other shows. I’m not sure that I had enough coffee in me yet to properly express my horror at being asked “Are you here for the kid expo?” “Christ, no!” is apparently not the standard response.
Happily I did find my way into the SMX side of the hall after picking up the requisite backpack full of swag to slip into a comfy chair for the opening panel: “Search Integration: Are We There Yet?” James Lamberti of ComScore quipped that he wanted to prep a powerpoint slide with a giant “No” on it.
SEM: Wachovia and Wells Fargo Miss Out on Windfall from Search Engine Interest
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Written By Noah Mallin | October 3, 2008 | Share This
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Millions of consumers and business who have accounts and dealings with Wachovia and (last week with Washington Mutual) found themselves wondering some pretty basic questions: Is my money safe? Do I have to switch banks? Is the other shoe going to drop?
Increasingly the first place Americans go to when that want answers fast is a search engine. It makes sense – this is when the ability to deliver a relevant result out of the vast sea of information available online truly shines. So why does corporate America still not get it?
Wachovia just announced their purchase by Wells Fargo in the latest in a series of dizzying financial defensive moves by debt saddled institutions. Even more confusing, this comes barely a week after a government arranged shotgun wedding between Wachivia and Citigroup. So what happens when consumers did a search for “wachovia” or “wachovia” and “financial crisis” or “wachovia” and “wells fargo”?
SEM: Election ‘08 - There’s No Debate When it Comes to Optimized Landing Pages for Search Engine Ads
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Written By Andaiye Taylor | October 2, 2008 | Share This
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Successful search marketing campaigns require marketers to execute a multi-pronged strategy the right way. For a political campaign (and any campaign that is impacted by rapidly shifting events) search campaigns must be 24-hour-news-cycle-ready, and if the landing page isn’t spot on it may as well not be run at all.
As we noted earlier this week, the Obama campaign appears to have become a lot more aggressive and quick on the draw with their search marketing strategy. Yet there are two areas where the campaign can build on their improved search presence. First, the Obama campaign could employ a much more tactical landing page strategy. Secondly, and particularly because this is a political campaign, both campaigns could do a better job of pivoting between evergreen issues, those that will always be of interest, and flare-ups, those all-consuming – if sometimes temporary – issues that rule news cycles until another flare-up overtakes them. (Sometimes the two merge as with the always important but, of late, direly important economy in recent weeks.)
Search News: McCain Suspends the Campaign Suspension When it Comes to Search Ads
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Written By Noah Mallin | September 25, 2008 | Share This
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John McCain announced on Wednesday that he would be pulling all advertising and suspending his campaign while he hurries back to Washington to help “fix” the nation’s ailing economy. A number of observers have wondered why the campaign would have to be suspended and from the looks of McCain’s search advertising the candidate is wondering the same thing.
A quick glance at Google confirms that search ads are still running for terms surrounding both McCain’s and Palin’s names, placed by the McCain/Palin campaign. This jibes with other offline evidence that the campaign continues such as an appearance by McCain with Katie Couric last night (after apparently lying to David Letterman about “flying back to Washington” and not being able to make his scheduled Late Show appearance) and an airport rally for Sarah Palin today.
Search News: Will McCain be America’s First Search President?
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Written By Noah Mallin | September 8, 2008 | Share This
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One of the first posts I did for SearchViews asked whether Obama would be America’s first search President. At the time Senator Obama had just emerged from a bruising primary battle with Hillary Clinton: his more sophisticated search engine and social media strategy was a major contributing factor to his win. At the end of the post I pointed out that John McCain was beginning to take a very aggressive strategy towards search marketing and wondered whether this would force Obama to step up his game even more.
Well, as Reprise Media Managing Partner Joshua Stylman pointed out Friday on The Huffington Post while Obama continues to focus on social media McCain has solidified his lead in spending on search engine advertising. Even more crucial, McCain’s search campaign is far more sophisticated than Obama’s surprisingly old-fashioned approach.
Search Marketing: Reprise Media’s Joshua Stylman Quoted Today in WSJ
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Written By Noah Mallin | August 28, 2008 | Share This
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Reprise Media’s Managing Partner Joshua Stylman is featured in a great article in today’s Wall Street Journal by Emily Steel and Suzanne Vranica. The piece titled “McCain Seems to Have Obama Beat in One Arena” explores advertising, marketing and the major candidates in the 2008 Presidential election.
The title of the article is based on Josh’s observation that the Obama camp has done everything right online, with the exception of their paid search component. He breaks out the differences in the search spend for both campaigns and compares the missed opportunities so far in ‘08 to some of the missed chances in ‘04. It’s a must-read for convention week.
Events: Reprise Media to Speak on Search and Branding at Conversational Marketing Summit
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Written By Noah Mallin | June 9, 2008 | Share This
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Those of you lucky enough to be attending Federated Media’s 2008 CM Summit : New Brand Way in New York are in for a treat as Reprise Media’s very own Managing Partner Josh Stylman will be a featured panelist tomorrow at 11:00 AM.
He’ll be on the on the panel Search and Brand: The Missing Link (which I’m told has nothing to do with Sasquatch) moderated by John Battelle, Chairman and CEO, Federated Media.
Blame It (and Everything Else) on Quality Score
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Written By Peter Hershberg | June 6, 2007 | Share This
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This week’s SMX Conference featured a panel called “Inside the Auction Black Box.” Not surprisingly, most of the panelist’s presentations – and nearly all of the questions from the audience – focused on the search marketing community’s collective inability to understand exactly how Google’s Quality Score (and all the associated mechanics of the ad ranking system) works. Questions ranged from “Why did my ad’s minimum CPC go from $.25 to $5.00 when it was getting a 10% click-through rate?” to “Are my landing pages being crawled?”
What was somewhat surprising, however, was the amount of time spent discussing how the black box impacts the type of support Google provides to its advertisers. And I couldn’t help but walk away from that session feeling that my suspicions had been confirmed - that the account teams at Google either have no better understanding of how their ad ranking system works than the rest of the search marketing world does OR they’ve been advised that, when in doubt, blame the unexplainable on Quality Score.
For example, for the past few weeks we’ve been managing an AdWords campaign for a local advertiser. His keyword list, consequently, is extensively populated with local “tail” terms. Not long after the campaign launched, a high percentage of keywords were deactivated due to low quality scores - which we pretty much expected to happen. To our surprise, however, dynamic keyword insertion wasn’t working for many of the city names that we wanted to feature in the ad creative. The instances when it was working seemed to be completely random.
We reached out to the folks at Google to see if they could help us address the issue. Nearly two weeks after opening a help ticket, we received their formal response:
“You’ll recall that we spoke specifically about keywords like ‘XXXX,’ ‘YYYY,’ and ‘ZZZZ.’ These keywords are not dynamically inserted into your ad text because their corresponding Quality Scores aren’t high enough to qualify for keyword insertion.
Maintaining high-quality ads for both users and advertisers is important to AdWords. Your keyword’s Quality Score reflects your clickthrough rate (CTR), plus your keyword, ad text, and landing page content.
This quality standard can affect your ads and keywords using dynamic keyword insertion. Therefore, if a keyword’s Quality Score is low, the keyword won’t appear in the ad (we’ll insert the default text instead). This ensures that users see relevant keywords in a dynamic keyword insertion ad, so that they continue to see relevant ads overall.
To learn how to improve the quality of your ad text, please visit https://adwords.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?answer=27648&hl=en_US.”
Needless to say, I wanted to see how Google suggested we could improve the quality of our ad text, so I visited the url they had provided us with.
Unbelievably enough, Google suggests the following:
“Review your keyword list to choose your ad title. Find keywords with the highest number of clicks or impressions. For example, if the keyword phrase ‘online advertising’ is clearly generating the most clicks and impressions in your account, use this term in the title of your ad. This is an effective way of increasing clickthrough rate because users can see immediately that your ad is relevant to their query. Also, any keywords you include in any part of your ad text are automatically highlighted in bold type on Google, when a user enters the keywords as part of their query. This helps draw the user’s attention to the ad.”
So, the best way for me to increase the quality of my ad is by featuring the keyword that the user searched for in my ad copy? That would be great were it not for the fact that I was just told that my ad’s Quality Score wasn’t high enough to justify using dynamic keyword insertion to feature the keyword in my ad copy. How else can I make sure that user keywords are always featured?
Well, according to Google:
“To help ensure that your ad appears for a specific keyword and includes this keyword in the ad text, please manually create the ad. Such ads that do not use keyword insertion are considered ’static text ads.’ The static ad you create can appear with your specific keyword when your dynamic ad is not eligible to appear with that keyword. “
Forgetting for a moment that creating tens of thousands of “static ads” is a complete pain in the ass, I’m having a hard time following the logic here. On the one hand, Google is suggesting that the use of dynamic keyword insertion on ads with low Quality Scores may cause users to see “irrelevant” ads. But if I manually create a static version of the *exact* same ad that was previously deemed irrelevant, users will suddenly find it relevant? Right.
Call it a catch-22, call it poor customer service…or just blame it on Quality Score.
Google Launches Ad Creation Marketplace for Video and Audio Ads
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Written By Kate Zimmermann | May 10, 2007 | Share This
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Yesterday Google launched their Ad Creation Marketplace through Google Adwords, to help advertisers create radio and video ads without any prior experience. Check out screenshots of the new interface, or watch Google’s demo video. From Inside Adwords,
“We wanted to make it easy for any advertiser to try out video — even someone who doesn’t know anything about video advertising or video ad creation. So, we’ve developed the Google Ad Creation Marketplace, accessible right from your AdWords account. The Ad Creation Marketplace is a resource for advertisers who are interested in running video ads but don’t have experience creating video ads and want customized help from a professional.”
The Ad Creation Marketplace is a searchable directory of professional ad specialists who can provide script writing, editing, production, and voice-over talent. The process of finding a specialist takes a week on average and is expected to cost anywhere from $100 to $1000. Check out Google’s comprehensive FAQ for more information about the Ad Creation Marketplace.