SES NY: Search Ad Buyers Forum
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Written By Kate Zimmermann | April 12, 2007 | Share This
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“How many hangovers?!” asked Moderator Dana Todd, and so began the self-dubbed Angry Ad Buyers Session. She introduced with her customary run down of What Dana Todd is Thinking about search, the internet, etc. From her presentation,
“Stop developing half-assed products every 20 minutes and really improve what we have”
Are we killing […]
“How many hangovers?!” asked Moderator Dana Todd, and so began the self-dubbed Angry Ad Buyers Session. She introduced with her customary run down of What Dana Todd is Thinking about search, the internet, etc. From her presentation,
- “Stop developing half-assed products every 20 minutes and really improve what we have”
- Are we killing the efficiency of search media by giving up control? Maybe not… should we embrace inefficiency in order to sustain the market?
- PPC Tech - relevant? effective? overpriced?
- Mobile search is still 2 years from traction
- Money this year is on Local (said that last year, but…)
- Industry is feeling “bubble-y”
- Yahoo is not dead yet!
- Google increasing “frienemy” behavior
- All other search engines are too boring to talk about
And with a plea to Ask.com to “stop breaking my heart”, Todd turned the mic over to Joel Lapp from Reprise Media. Lapp discussed how the search industry is slowly becoming standardized, largely thanks to Yahoo’s introduction of Panama. Standardization is a good thing, he said, because it makes it easier to manage bigger campaigns, will encourage more advertisers to run across multiple engines, requires less internal training, and of course, makes everyone more money. Three of the most helpful standards created by panama are terminology, structure, and handling of contextual search. Two areas still desperately in need of standardization, however, are query display and production sheets. Finally, he says, don’t believe everything the engines claim is “standard”, because minor differences can cause huge disruptions when translating a campaign in bulk.
Philip Stelter from Range spoke next on quality score. As of Week 10 following the Panama update, he reports that CPCs are higher but gradually dropping, that conversion rates are stable and CTR remains higher. Range has seen, however, quite a bit of “reactive bid activity” - causing erratic results for many clients. Panama displays some of the positive and negatives of adopting quality score - on the positive end, gaming is gone, advertisers get better qualified leads (maybe), and brand owners have a bidding advantage; on the negative end, quality score gives marketers less control, tries to standardize a value (”quality”) that should be relative to a campaign, and testing can be costly. All in all, advertisers can adapt to quality score by tracking and testing on a regular basis, focusing on landing page optimization, leveraging match types, and taking an “integrated campaign approach”.
Stephanie Krebs, Director of Online & Search Marketing for Dominion Enterprises, followed Stelter. As a publishing company that does search in house, Dominion Enterprises approached search as a way to boost revenue for traditional media. In her own experience with panama, volume and performance are up, but budgeting tools aren’t yet reliable and the system has NOT stabilized. Krebs presents two thoughts on how traditional media and search can be used in coordination:
- Idea One: Publish specialized newsletters based on search term research, infuse publications with ads that encourage readers to go online.
- Idea Two: Re-evaluate your Ad Outlets - she found in testing that using Google and other search syndicates was more effective than Google alone. Bottom line - spread out your budget (duh)
Matt Greitzer, Director of Search Marketing from Avenue A | Razorfish is last to present. He gives an overview of their Panama results - Search Impressions, CTR, and overall CPA is up, while CPC and conversion rates are down. Considering the wide variation of results across clients, however, he feels that the increase in click rate is the only really significant statistic. Greitzer then launched into a discussion of what industry trends are all hype, and which actually deliver results. In descending order from “Results” to “Hype”, he ordered: Contextual Search, Search Related Media Opportunities (behavioral targeting, etc), Vertical Search, Mobile Search. Mobile, specifically, he labeled “all Hype” - reiterating Todd’s initial speculation that mobile is still 2 years away from traction.
Last but not least, Q & A… Here are a few highlights:
Q: What are some tips for running contextual as opposed to search, and what’s unique about running a contextual campaign?
A: Panelists advise breaking contextual and search into separate campaigns, because you need to group keywords differently. Keywords have to be better defined in contextual to avoid embarrassing errors. Contextual is also challenging because you have to by trial and error find the right keyword groupings - as a result, hands-on management is key in contextual. Lapp suggests putting heavy emphasis on the search creative in contextual, because you’re dealing with a much more passive audience.Q: One of our major advertisers recently moved their site over to flash - any tips on how to optimize the site so that it doesn’t affect quality score?
A: Joel says the best approach there is to manage the landing page in the same way that you manage your site SEO. Dana Todd suggests cloaking - ha ha ha - or, better yet, ask your client to do AB testing until they get rid of the flash.Q: Is old bid management technology still helpful for campaigns with Google or Yahoo?
A: Philip says that Range is “technology agnostic” - they use third party technology in conjunction with an in-house program to maximize bidding efficiency. Stephanie says, they’ve tested every tool out there and what they keep coming back to is “being good marketers”. Matt says that the real value of bid management tools is purely to save time - but, bid management absolutely has to be considered in context of other tools that enable whole “campaign management”. Joel says that at Reprise we work with a bunch of third party tools along with our in house tools, but our philosophy is to focus on marketing before bid management - so that marketing expertise ties together the campaign that’s run on technology.Q: Beyond the bid, landing page, ad copy and click through rate, what other factors affect quality score?
A: Session - if a user clicks through, and immediately hits the back button or returns to a search engine, it’ll hurt quality ratings. Dana Todd says, they’re most concerned with revenue - Philip corrects, “You mean relevance”, “same thing” says Dana.Q: Have you heard of Yahoo or MSN creating a bulk editing tool like google?
A: Joel says, it makes perfect sense to us, though we haven’t heard anything yet. Though Yahoo has a bulk uploading tool with Panama, it doesn’t work very well. Philip reports that MSN sent him a survey about bulk editing and uploading tools, so he thinks its in the works from Microsoft.
Topics: Advertising: Online, Conferences & Events, SEM: Firms, Search: News |