Posts Tagged ‘Pay Per Call’

A Follow up to Apogee’s 2008 Search Predictions

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At the beginning of the year, this post on the Apogee Search Marketing Blog made some predictions about search marketing in 2008. Before we try to make any predictions about 2009, let’s take a minute to review 2008’s search predictions compared to what actually occurred over the last 12 months.

Apogee’s 2008 search predictions were as follows:

  1. Management tools become the cost of having a seat at the paid search table, rather than a competitive advantage. PPC management tools were certainly abundant in 2008. And, yes, they were almost necessary to a campaign’s success. Whether these tools were internal or external, focused on automated bid management, analyzing data or testing campaign variables, management tools freed up paid search managers’ time so they could focus on new opportunities, expansion and overall strategy.
  2. Business/marketing acumen becomes more important to paid search management than technical prowess. While tools are great, tools just do what we tell them to do. Ultimately paid search managers have to set appropriate goals for marketers and outline the necessary steps to reach those goals. This year ad copy and landing page testing have gained popularity as marketers focus on increasing conversion rates. With new tools such as Google Website Optimizer (GWO), these tests are becoming easier to implement.
  3. Search engines continue to provide better bid management functionality. Most tools vendors don’t react. Search engines have made many improvements in an effort to provide better bid management functionality in 2008, but despite all of the changes made this year, there is still a long way to go in providing reliable bid management functionality.
    • Google announced a new quality score method this year that determines CPC in “real-time,” as opposed to its tried and true static quality scores. It also allows for marketers to see first page bids rather than minimum bids.
    • AdWords Editor now allows users to download performance statistics so that analysis and adjustments can easily be made in the same interface. In addition, the newest 7.0 version, allows users to see quality scores and first page bid estimates for keywords.
    • Yahoo! now allows marketers to view average rankings when in the bid editing page.
    • MSN Live Search released a desktop beta tool that is essentially an AdWords Editor for Microsoft.

    Bid management tools are also still a bit behind the curve. While their automation saves paid search managers time by adjusting bids, they are slow to react to changes made by search engines. Adjusting bids manually within the search engine’s interface is often more complicated than just using the free tools offered by search engines. As for full blown campaign management, we’re still not seeing many tools with the ability to handle that functionality yet.

  4. Google extends its lead in the paid search market, either a little or a lot, depending upon how you measure the industry. Without a doubt, Google continues to be the leader in the paid search realm. ComScore recently released that in October 2008 Google Sites held 63.1% of all searches, as compared to58.5% in October of 2007. Google’s revenue also increased 31% from third quarter 2007 to third quarter 2008, raking in $5.54 billion in Q3 2008.As for service offerings, Google rolled out tool after tool after tool aimed at helping paid search marketers in 2008. All of these tools successfully assist marketers in optimizing and expanding their paid search campaigns, allowing for Google to maintain and grow its steady cash flow.
  5. Local search continues to grow, but still has a difficult time providing substantive traffic in most markets. This year businesses flocked to Google Local Business Center. It has become “the” thing to do. As Universal Search rolled out throughout the year, local search optimization became even more visible and critical. In most industries and major cities, a business with a service that is location-specific and not on Google Local, will basically be behind by the end of this year.Furthermore, Google’s Local Business Ads (LBAs), a version of paid ads that appear mostly on Google Maps, contributed heavily to local search’s growth in 2008.
  6. Google rolls Click-To-Call in with its local search service, and still no one cares.Not much word about Click-to-Call this year; still no one cares. What has gained recognition in 2008 is phone call tracking for paid search campaigns. Companies such as ClickPath, provide the ability to track calls to the keyword level.
  7. Google Pay Per Action gains traction with B2C advertisers, struggles with B2B advertisers. Google launched Pay Per Action beta globally in June 2007, but phased it out in 2008, citing the DoubleClick/Performics acquisition as the reasoning.
  8. Google Product Search (previously Froogle) celebrates its sixth birthday, remains in beta. Yes, Google Product Search is still in Beta. During 2008, this product caught up with other comparison shopping engines by showing groups of similar products when a search is performed. This change caught some bloggers’eyes when it first rolled out, but ironically, later in the year Google Product Search made it on the list of search engines you’ve never heard of. An option that many companies have not yet tapped into is submitting services just as you would submit products.
  9. Google continues to rail against paid links. The paid linking industry adjusts and continues to provide SEO benefit to its clients. SocialSpark was launched byPayPerPost in mid-2008, and the head of Google’s webspam team Matt Cuttssays he actually likes IZEA’s new service. SocialSpark provides advertisers an opportunity to pay bloggers for a review but requires a nofollow link to the advertiser.Another paid link vendor, Text Link Ads (TLA) launched InLinks publicly in November. Throughout 2008, Google has commented and posted extensivelythat paid links are in violation of the FTC’s Guides Concerning Use of Endorsements and Testimonials in Advertising. SEO bloggers have been debating about the impact of these changes as recently as the last few weeks.For whatever reason, Yahoo! and MSN haven’t been quite as vocal against paid linking in 2008. Yahoo! isn’t worried about the payment as much as the likelihood that a paid link usually doesn’t give as much value as a non-paid link.
  10. SEO becomes more metrics driven as companies learn to measure their SEO performance. Absolutely. Tracking SEO leads and sales provides ROI that is critical to include in a company’s overall marketing expenditure analysis. The tricky part here is if the company knows what the value of a lead is to them or if they can track natural search visitors all the way through to a sale. During 2008, fewer companies were concerned about rankings as they were forced to look more at the bottom line.
  11. Rumors swirl about an imminent merger between Yahoo! and Microsoft triggering a deluge of blog posts and nothing else. Yes, definitely. Talks between Yahoo! and Microsoft surfaced again early in the year but have fizzled quickly. Mid-2008 Google stole Yahoo! from Microsoft and became the attention of all, but that too died out by the end of the year. Although Google and Yahoo! gave it a shot with a trial period during the spring, antitrust scrutiny and regulatory concerns ultimatelycaused Google to call it quits with Yahoo.
  12. The line between Search Engine Optimization and Social Media Marketing blurs further, except among those that actually know how to perform SEO and/or SMM. SEO and SMM definitely continue to be blurred in some circles (i.e. many marketers think creating a Facebook page will greatly help their search engine efforts). While creation of the company’s profile in these outlets is a fairly straightforward process, actually promoting them becomes much trickier and requires a completely different set of goals and strategies. Tracking offline inquiries becomes an important consideration but is not yet mastered in most campaigns.

Twelve Predictions for Search Marketing in 2008

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In a courageous show of unity against the oppression of Base 10 numbering systems, here is our list of a dozen predictions for the search engine marketing industry this year.

1. Management tools become the cost of having a seat at the paid search table, rather than a competitive advantage.
In past years, advertisers in competitive spaces received a significant advantage over others simply through the proper use of PPC tools. In 2008, one better use management tools if one even wants to be in the game. The more advanced tools (those that provide true campaign management, rather than just bid management) will provide some advantage at first, but that will decrease as the traditional bid management tools add campaign management functionality.

2. Business/marketing acumen becomes more important to paid search management than technical prowess.
As the technical landscape levels out, the need for true business acumen will increase. Competitive advantage will be provided by marketing abilities, not proprietary or third-party tools. Testing and measurement of ad copy, landing pages, and lead forms will be critical for success.

3. Search engines continue to provide better bid management functionality. Most tools vendors don’t react.
The search engines have made it clear that they consider bid management to be their bailiwick. As a result, they have veiled the control of bids, so that one needs only set a maximum bid, rather than adjust bids at regular intervals. In fact, bids need only be changed when data changes on the advertisers end, such as conversion rate of margin per order, and Google Editor gets better at this task with every version. The PPC tool vendors, however, have considerable money invested in the development of bid management, and will be resistant to change. The more savvy vendors will add campaign management functions, but we won’t see much until the 3rd or 4th quarter of the year, at the earliest.

4. Google extends its lead in the paid search market, either a little or a lot, depending upon how you measure the industry.
Not surprisingly, Google remains the industry leader in paid search. If you count their actual revenue from paid search, they should grab several more percentage points of the market pie from their competitors. If you count all the revenue they roll in with paid search (such as that from AdWords), their gains will be substantial as they continue to expand their service offerings.

5. Local search continues to grow, but still has a difficult time providing substantive traffic in most markets.
The search engines have invested considerably in improving the tools around local search over the last couple of years. In most cases, however, the traffic levels are still not material. One certainly shouldn’t rely on local search as one’s only traffic source, but that would be true about any marketing technique. As more cell phones have access to services like Google Maps, the traffic will increase, but most of that impact won’t be seen until 2009.

6. Google rolls Click-To-Call in with its local search service and still no one cares.
Click-To-Call has not exactly been a success. The call volume has been practically non-existent. There are limited people interested in making phone calls from Internet advertisements, and Ingenio has most of that audience locked up. As a result, Google plans to combine Click-To-Call with their local search service. Unfortunately, this won’t make a substantial difference in 2008. If few people are utilizing local search (see above), even fewer are interested in calling directly from said advertisements.

7. Google Pay Per Action gains traction in with B2C advertisers, struggles with B2B advertisers.
Pay Per Action (PPA) is the latest attempt by Google to reduce the risk of online advertising, while capturing a larger percentage of the value generated. It has had moderate success with B2C advertisers, but very little with B2B advertisers. This trend will continue in 2008, with PPA building to a non-trivial amount of its revenue from B2C advertisers.

8. Google Product Search (previously Froogle) celebrates its sixth birthday, remains in beta.
Google’s never ending beta price comparison engine goes off to first grade, but still doesn’t become a formally released product. The General Availability first graders laugh.

9. Google continues to rail against paid links. The paid linking industry adjusts and continues to provide SEO benefit to its clients.
If any doubted Google’s feelings towards paid links, Google made them very clear in 2007. As it happens, most of Google’s actions were about generating F.U.D.; the actual penalties to those selling links were limited at best. Google’s ability to detect paid links in a programmatic manner is quite limited, so they will continue to monitor their complain-about-paid-links form. The number of false and competitor submissions to this form will greatly reduce its utility, however. We can expect Google to force changes in behavior on the paid links industry, but the amount of money is such that the industry will find a way to adjust. At best, Google will push paid links underground, which is not a winning solution for anyone.

10. SEO becomes more metrics driven as companies learn to measure their SEO performance.
For all too long, SEO has been about attaining rankings and little else. Some firms are at least tracking the traffic generated, but when push comes to shove, clicks are a cost center. Companies need to move to metrics that really matter, such as leads or sales generated.

11. Rumors swirl about an imminent merger between Yahoo and Microsoft triggering a deluge of blog posts and nothing else.
This has become an annual summer event, and 2008 will be no different. Like two college kids who can’t quite seem to make it work, Yahoo and Microsoft will talk about getting together, but decide yet again that neither is ready to settle.

12. The line between Search Engine Optimization and Social Media Marketing blurs further, except among those that actually know how to perform SEO and/or SMM.
While there is clearly some overlap between SEO and SMM, the proper approaches and expected outputs of each are very different. Still, many in the online marketing industry will confound the issue by equating them, performing poorly at both. The more savvy firms will either build separate teams for each, or outsource to firms that specialize in one or the other.

Creating a Paid Search Magnum Opus

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Only a few writers have mastered the art of keeping it short and sweet. It took Dickens only 52 characters to sum up the French Revolution. Luckily for novices, Google and Yahoo! offer a total of 95 characters to create an ad for online products and services. However writing for character limits instead of content is often difficult, especially in terms of writing for an advertisement. Listed below are some of the most common ways advertisers lose characters that could have been used on more important pieces of information.

Guarantees- First and foremost: the word guarantee eats up nine characters. Last but not least: if you are “Guaranteeing the Web’s Lowest Prices,” there are at least 50 different competitors guaranteeing the same thing. A better use of nine characters is a description of the benefits your product or service has, in contrast to the competition.

Exclamation points- Unless you are Yahoo!, or have writers Tourettes, there is no reason to use exclamation points.

Since When?- The only people who care if your business has been around since the 30’s are the people who remember the 30’s; and a good portion of them still think they don’t have enough room for a computer, much less the ability to shop on them (I still love you Paw-Paw). Overall, a claim to economic longevity is best kept in a newspaper or radio ad.

Location- Chances are that if someone is shopping online via paid search, they are doing so because they are a hermit. Therefore putting the location of your business in a paid search ad is both futile, and a waste of characters.

Phone Numbers- If your lead or sale is measured by phone numbers, create a pay-per-call account. Otherwise you are wasting media spend on a fruitless click.

Superfluous Calls to Action- Unless there is a limited offer on Rick Springfield commemorative plates, there is no reason I am going to “Order Now!”

There is no doubt that brevity is difficult. It took Stephen King 1,138 pages to create a public service announcement for shape shifting child-murdering monsters, but realizing that there are portions of paid search advertisements that can be omitted is the first step to becoming a better paid search writer.

Google Looks to Patent Mobile Click-to-call Ads

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ClickZ
Google is clearly working hard to get an Intellectual Property land-grab going to avoid a repeat of its early days in pay per click, when it wantonly tread all over the early GoTo/Overture/Yahoo patent on the fundamental Pay Per Click model, and had to settle the case (without, of course, admitting wrongdoing) for quite the large sum.