SEM: Keyword Generation
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.
SEM: Using Google Insights to Explore Old Media’s Geographic Reach
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Written By Noah Mallin | August 12, 2008 | Share This
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Newspapers by their nature tend to be local. Their location is even part of their name in most cases. Even so, certain newspapers are so influential that their reach extends beyond their location to other parts of the country and even the world. I thought it would be interesting to see how this might be reflected in Google’s dandy new toy, Insights for Search.
I picked four of the best know daily papers in the United States, The New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, the Washington Post and the Miami Herald. As a ringer I added USA Today to see if a paper that bills itself as a national one really has national scope online. The timeframe was calendar year 2007.
SEO & SEM: Google Puts Another Bullet in the Chamber with Insights for Search
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Written By Noah Mallin | August 6, 2008 | Share This
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The latest, Insights for Search (I4S to the kids?) is already a hit around the Reprise Media offices – allowing for quick and easy keyword research by geography and comparative volume. That being said, it’s not an adequate replacement for most of the popular keyword research tools for sale – yet. The difference lies in how far you are able to drill down to hard numbers and demographic data.
SEM and Social Media: Message to Non-Profit Google Grant Recipients – We’re Ready to Help You Pro Bono
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Written By Noah Mallin | July 23, 2008 | Share This
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I have a lot of friends who work for non-profit organizations, and I don’t just mean the local Starbucks. When their organization receives a big grant it’s a huge cause for celebration, especially if the grant can be used to seed other potential donation points.
As part of Google’s avoidance-of-evildoing philosophy (see number 6) they have a program called Google Grants which they describe as “…a unique in-kind advertising program. It harnesses the power of our flagship advertising product, Google AdWords, to non-profits seeking to inform and engage their constituents online.”
Cool stuff and a great way to connect with potential donors and other interest groups, but what often happens at even the biggest non-profit organization is that because of a lack of resources or expertise or both, they find themselves unable to maximize the effectiveness of their Google Grants. Sometimes this means only being able to spend a portion of their available grant each month, other times it means bidding on keywords that aren’t getting the kind of return that they might be hoping for.
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.
Wordtracker Launches UK Version
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Written By Kate Zimmermann | February 13, 2007 | Share This
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Today Wordtracker launched a UK version of their popular keyword research tool. From the Wordtracker blog,
“The new UK service will provide essential keyword research for:
- UK websites serving the local market
- Businesses wishing to target the UK (the world’s fifth largest economy)
- Search engine optimization companies and design agencies with UK clients.”
Wordtracker is a staple SEO keyword research tool in the US, so their move into the UK market seems like a natural progression.
The Genius of Keyword Suggestion Tools
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Written By Reprise Media | May 13, 2005 | Share This
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In a sense, search engine marketing is the only medium where the consumer requests to see your ad. This suggests a far more captive consumer than you’ll find through any push media. Because the entire SEM channel is keyword-based, the marketer has to anticipate the idea that a user searches and what’s conveyed by each […]
In a sense, search engine marketing is the only medium where the consumer requests to see your ad. This suggests a far more captive consumer than you’ll find through any push media. Because the entire SEM channel is keyword-based, the marketer has to anticipate the idea that a user searches and what’s conveyed by each keyword - the consumer’s needs and interests as well as their biases and preconceived notions (consider the fine line between services and products, explicitly recognized by your keyword searches).
Search engine marketing campaigns start with keywords, there’s no denying that. It’s the keywords that create ad inventory and initialize that dialogue between consumers and brands.
So how do you build a proper keyword list? If you know your audience, you most likely have a pretty good idea of your most vital keyword targets. Once you know what works, there’s a ton of keyword suggestion tools out there to help expand your campaign. Some provide recommendations through clustering practices, some feed suggestions from taxonomies created by their search spiders, some might even cross-reference the running lists of what prior users had entered for expansion. Finally, as with Yahoo! and their Matchdriver technology, some of the engines simply feed your submission through their technologies to suggest broad match interpretations. One technology, Wordtracker, uses forward stemming to extrapolate from root terms. It’s a good idea in theory, but in reality, you’ll find a keyword like “hello” will return “hellokitty”, or one more unfortunate, “helloween”. Incidentally, this is the actual example the site offers in their demo. We’re going to guess this particular technology must’ve been built by German metal fans from the 80’s.
So which resources should you be using, and why? You’ll probably want to start with an assortment of services. Google’s tool allows the importation of a long list of keywords, for expansion purposes, while Yahoo! Search Marketing’s tool asks that you enter one term at a time. Wordtracker can turn singular to plural and vice versa, removes hyphenates and similar characters, and also provides misspellings. Searchspell is a resource that specializes in misspellings while Keyword Lizard allows you to hyphenate spaces, remove spaces, add quotation marks to emulate Google’s phrase match convention or brackets to emulate their exact match convention. Finally Yahoo! Search often provides recommendations for additional searches, that might help expand legitimate keywords. Type in “mobile phone” and the results page will suggest you also try “mobile phone tools”,”Samsung mobile phone”, “mobile phone reviews”, etc.
We at Reprise Media don’t necessarily endorse any or all of them over a manual process, ultimately they’re just technologies and nobody really knows where the recommendations come from. We recently plugged a few obvious Father’s Day keywords into the Google suggestion tool and got some interesting results. Our main submissions “Father’s Day”, “Father’s Day gifts” and “gifts for Dad” yielded roughly 400 returns. Many expansions simply built off the main clause of Father’s Day (”father’s day cards”, “fathers day greetings”, “fathers day sale”) and would reasonably be fed into the client’s campaign. Some suggestions worked off established taxonomies, suggesting synonyms like “stepfather”, “spouse” and “daddy”. We can work with those…
Others took related terms and broke them into their composite parts, yielding standalone recommendations like “present”, “homemade”, “birthday”, “crafty”, and “June”. These are all understandable, but might require a bit of legwork to recreate the legitimate search phrases. Once in a while we get a recommendation so out of left field that it blows our minds. At the very bottom of Google’s recommendations lists we found something called “pressie” (some kind of Cockney slang?), a possible sniglet in “marvelicious”, and finally, the piece de resistance of “monkeypox”. This last one suggested an old joke from Carnac the Magnificent (”what do you get the man who has everything”).
Ultimately, as in all walks of life, you should pay attention to the fine print. Google offers the following disclaimer above their suggestion tool:
“Please note that we cannot guarantee that these keywords will improve your campaign performance. We also reserve the right to disapprove any new keywords you add. Keep in mind that you are responsible for the keywords you select and their appropriate and legal use.”
Somehow, this disclaimer feels very closely tied to that ‘monkeypox’ suggestion.
Randy Schwartz is Director of Strategic Development at Reprise Media.
Corporate Bigwigs Bet on Branding Ads
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Written By Reprise Media | March 24, 2005 | Share This
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Call it search advertising that’s not out to sell you anything. More and more major corporations are hedging their bets on search ads that aren’t aimed at driving an immediate sale.
Sometimes it’s done in the name of branding, other times it’s a way to woo busy executives with (hopefully) valuable information they can use to […]
Call it search advertising that’s not out to sell you anything. More and more major corporations are hedging their bets on search ads that aren’t aimed at driving an immediate sale.
Sometimes it’s done in the name of branding, other times it’s a way to woo busy executives with (hopefully) valuable information they can use to run their everyday operations, with an eye on a long-term sale.
In a market that’s growth is slowing down, the B2B vertical in particular has remained a bright spot, and this trend is proof positive. Tim Armstrong, VP of Ad Sales at Google, notes “a significant sea change” in the level of businesses’ interest in using search ads to reach out to other businesses.
Read the rest of the story in this article on WSJ.com, called Your Ad Here, 10 Words Max (please note: registration required).
Branding ads can deliver respectable results, even when no direct sale is involved. Unlike commerce-driven ads, however, the data may be a little harder to get a handle on. How do you measure the impact of your messaging?
A few points to keep in mind:
- Where is the user going?: Make sure you have a clear destination of where you’d like the user to wind up, with landing pages relevant to the keyword and creative messaging.
- What will they find when they get there?: Deep, high-quality content is key to creating consumer value and loyalty, whether it’s a technical white paper, case study, or business advice. Creative messaging should use calls to action such as “read”, “discover”, “learn more about”, etc.
- How are you tracking?: Even though the amount of leads rolling in will not likely be as high as a traditional product-oriented ad, you shouldn’t let tracking fall by the wayside. Determine your target metrics early on and keep in mind that a corporate sale might involve a much lengthier conversion cycle from user click to conversion than is typical of most search ads.
Google Once Again Lawsuit Fodder for France
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Written By Reprise Media | March 21, 2005 | Share This
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The brand spankin’-new Google Blog over on CNET has this piece by Stefanie Olsen that talks about all the ways Google is getting France’s beret in a bunch over alleged copyright infringements, trademark names, and more.
The Agence France Presse is suing Google for supposedly infringing on its copyrights by using photos and headlines without prior […]
The brand spankin’-new Google Blog over on CNET has this piece by Stefanie Olsen that talks about all the ways Google is getting France’s beret in a bunch over alleged copyright infringements, trademark names, and more.
The Agence France Presse is suing Google for supposedly infringing on its copyrights by using photos and headlines without prior permission. The stories appear on the Google News page, which pulls in these and thousands of others in a collection of popular stories of the day.
Why is this an important debate? This could be a chance for other publishers to lash out at Google for its increasing power in the news aggregation field and could stand to threaten the aggregator as a delivery mechanism, though we don’t see that as happening any time soon.
Google also lost another round of the ‘trademark names as keyword triggers’ battle in a case filed by French travel companies Luteciel and Viaticum. Same initials as these guys, though we doubt there’s any relation.
France President Jacques Chirac also said this week that his country will starting its own digital book project, competing with Google’s print undertakings.
Now, come on. Whoever said the French were hostile…?
Niki Scevak Bursts the Bubble on Search Arbitrage
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Written By Reprise Media | March 4, 2005 | Share This
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Niki Scevak of Jupiter takes umbrage with Bambi Francisco’s article on MarketWatch that speaks of a pricing bubble in search resulting from ’search arbitrageurs’ who are artificially inflating the price of keyword searches.
Scevak calls Francisco out on two accounts: 1. That the concept of arbitrage as it relates to search even exists, and 2. That a pricing bubble has occurred as a result this so-called phenomenon.
We strongly agree with his post, and especially with Scevak’s assertion that the transactions of firms like Nextag are not without risk. Scevak writes:
Nextag takes a generic keyword, filters that user through the decision of what make and model, and often what price range the consumer is willing to pay for their dvd player, and then sells that more qualified lead to merchants. It furthers the consumer through the purchase funnel. Extra value is added.