SEM: Paid Search
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.
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.
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.
Search News: Google Spreading Tentacles Wider into Ad Exchanges?
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Written By Shivan Durbal | September 17, 2009 | Share This
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Rumor has it that in the near future, possibly within the next two weeks, we may see Google’s invitation only DoubleClick ad exchange marketplace door swung wide open to all buyers and sellers. This is according to ClickZ, but as such it’s still only rumor. As Mia Wallace said in Pulp Fiction “When you little scamps get together, you’re worse than a sewing circle.”
Still, assuming it’s true; Google could bring the worlds of search and display marketing closer together than ever and finally impose tools and measurement on display that we’ve been using for years in the search marketing field.
For those search marketers out there that are unfamiliar with ad exchanges in the display advertising space, in effect they are a support structure for the sale of undervalued, unused or remnant banner advertising inventory.
Search News: Ask Thinks Pink in Non-Profit Partnership
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Written By Ruth Nightengale | September 14, 2009 | Share This
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Despite the innumerable times the work we do is described as “not curing cancer,” there is now a search engine trying to do just that. Or at least help the cause along. Starting today, Ask.com allows you to personalize your Ask homepage in an effort to educate other users about the fight against breast cancer. While the focus of this partnership between Ask and the non-profit Susan G. Koman for the Cure is attention and education, Ask will also be donating up to 50 cents for each user who selects the Search for the Cure page skin and answers the questions on their branded ad panel at the top of their search page:
The branded panel is interesting in that it incorporates a one-click button to donate, as well as the standard array of social media buttons to let people on sites like Facebook know about your interest in finding a cure for breast cancer. Aside from being for a good cause, this is an innovative way for a search engine to partner with a non-profit in a “takeover” of their homepage, and I expect to see more of this in the future.
Search News: Google’s Move Left Leads to Double-Digit Rise in Clicks
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Written By Alex Staunton | August 27, 2009 | Share This
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Take this and let’s move it over an inch. It doesn’t sound like much of a change, but for Google, it’s huge. Google recently moved their ads over to the left a skosh, snuggling them closer to the organic results like Nick Cannon and Mariah Carey after a long day of shopping. While the average user probably noticed nothing, we in the search marketing industry have obsessed over what this change might mean for campaigns.
SEO and Paid Search: How Publishers Can Wriggle Out of the Ad Squeeze Without Losing Their Shirts
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Written By Alex Staunton with James Song and Vicky Fudali | August 26, 2009 | Share This
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At a time when the online publishing sector is almost as squeezed by the economy as its offline brethren, boosting visitors and engagement are key to maintaining and raising the ad revenue that can mean the survival of a publishing site. Typically this is best done through properly optimizing site content but it takes time to analyze the current site, make SEO recommendations, deploy those recommendations, and then for those changes to begin to bear fruit.
Search Metrics: For Every Query, There is a Season
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Written By Noah Mallin | August 19, 2009 | Share This
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Seasonality is not a new phenomenon in search marketing - every marketer worth their salt knows that queries for terms like “ski” go up in winter and “suntan” peaks in the summertime. However sometimes seasonal trends are less obvious to the naked eye which is why Google’s Insights For Search (among other tools) can be helpful, allowing users to trace back search volume for particular keywords and to compare the volumes over time for multiple keywords.
Paid Search: CARS Lifts Boats, but Not the Ones with Holes
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Written By Sean McDonald | August 13, 2009 | Share This
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I have always been fond of truisms - particularly the one that goes “a rising tide lifts all boats.” According to the elves at Wikipedia, this concept “is associated with the idea that improvements in the general economy will benefit all participants in that economy.” Search marketing is affected by macro-economic shifts just like most other sectors of the economy, and sometimes we are foresighted enough to anticipate the tide coming in.
Search News: Yahoo and Microsoft Deal Begs The Question: Nature or Nurture?
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Written By Noah Mallin | July 30, 2009 | Share This
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By now I’m assuming you know that Microsoft and Yahoo have signed a groundbreaking 10 year deal that sees Microsoft’s Bing search technology replacing Yahoo’s search engine and Yahoo’s sales team taking the lead on high-end search sales for both channels. This is just the kind of news that sends us into our search geek clubhouse here at Reprise Media, where beers are opened, feet are kicked up, and opinions start flying around the room like mosquitoes in a swamp (apologies to Dan Rather.)
One of the most interesting takes was an offhand comment from Vice President of Media John Chan. While sipping on his 40 he pointed out that for many of our paid search campaigns, campaign performance was noticeably better on Bing than on Yahoo. There are three reasons this might be: