Archive for the 'Search Engine Marketing' Category

Apr 15 2011

Advertising on YouTube with Google Adwords

Published by Premek under Online Advertising, Search Engine Marketing

YouTube is becoming more and more popular not only as an entertainment website but also as an advertising platform. With Google AdWords you can easily target YouTube users even with a small budget and with techniques you already know from AdWords. Let’s have a look at the most common ways your business can be promoted with YouTube advertising.

Basically there are two approaches to advertising on YouTube:

  • Promoting your video content (YouTube Promoted Videos)
  • Promoting your website through text, image and flash ads. Ads can appear inside videos and in content as well.

Advertising Video Content (YouTube Promoted Videos)

Promoted Videos are a good way to let YouTube users know about your videos without paying too much per click. All you need is to have an AdWords account and some video assets to advertise on.

Promoted Videos in Search

As one might expect, search advertising on YouTube is most cost effective. With wisely selected keywords and relevant ad copy you’ll get a high click-through rate and well targeted traffic. If you haven’t yet, you should probably start exploring YouTube’s advertising capabilities.

YouTube Promoted Videos - InSearch

See where the Sponsored Videos appear in YouTube Search.

As YouTube Search is a part of the Google Search Network, Google Search has to be turned on along with the Google Search Network.

The basic principles of ad ranking are the same as in Google Search and that is – briefly said – the Quality Score multiplied by the price you are bidding for a particular keyword.

Promoted Videos in Content

Besides YouTube Search, Promoted Videos can be displayed in YouTube content pages. Most commonly on video pages on the right side next to the video.

YouTube Promoted Videos - InContent

Of course, the Google Display Network needs to be turned on in campaign settings. From managed placements you have to select YouTube.com or desired YouTube categories in which you wish your videos to appear.

Good to know

  • Don’t expect the search CTR to be as high as it is for your Google Search ads. The reason is that YouTube ads have usually lower relevancy to the search query due to the fact that search queries on YouTube are not usually of a commercial nature. In this respect, you may wish to review an earlier blog of ours: To What Extent Does Google Match Search Results to Commercial Search Intent?
    But of course there are things you can do to help increase your CTR: Try to maintain relevancy of the ad headline to the search query – exactly as you would do with Google Search campaigns. Also, choose the video thumbnail carefully if possible. Testing different thumbnails will help you to achieve high click-through rates as well.
  • If you have a lot of videos to promote, you may find it a bit messy to search for their URLs. A good idea is to create your own YouTube channel. You can make your work easier by typing the name of your YouTube channel and then select from the videos as shown below:Searching videos within your own YouTube channel

Promoting Your Website in YouTube Content

Besides search advertising on YouTube, you can also make your ads appear in content. If you don’t have any videos to advertise, or simply want to get more traffic from YouTube, there are a lot of placements which you can target with various formats including text ads:

What you need is to turn content network on and select YouTube as a managed placement. Let’s have look at where ads can be shown and how to run them there.

Text overlays inside videos

These are common AdWords text ads showing in the bottom part of a video. Up to 3 text ads can be shown in the overlay. If you want to make sure your ads will be displayed in videos, add YouTube.com (or specific YT categories) to your display campaign managed placements.

YouTube advertising - Text overlays inside videos

InVideo image overlay

Image overlay is displayed in the bottom part of a video as well. The size is 480×70 and – contrary to text overlays – there can be only 1 ad shown at once but it can be accompanied by a 300×250 banner showing next to the video.
YouTube ads - InVideo image overlay
InVideo ad with accompanying banner next to the YouTube video.

To create an InVideo ad go to New ad -> Display ad builder -> Video -> InVideo Static Image

Video ads

InStream video ad is a short (typically 15 second) video ad played inside a YouTube video. If the video is longer than 10 minutes, the video ad can last up to 30 seconds. 300×250. An accompanying banner can be used as well.

To create an InStream ad go to New ad -> Display ad builder -> Video -> InStream Video Ad

Banners

As the Text InVideo overlays, banners aren’t a special YouTube format. It’s a common image ad and can be shown on the YouTube video page next to the video player (in the same place where InVideo companion banner is shown) and various other placements. The most common banner format you shouldn’t forget to make is 300×250.

The Placement Tool helps you to decide which other formats you may need to develop in order to be visible for a particular category.

Using the Google Placement tool to find YouTube placements
For each YouTube category, the Google Placement Tool shows available ad formats and the number of impressions you can get.

General tips and best practices

Usually it’s a good idea to create a separate campaign for your YouTube advertising especially for Promoted Videos. Clicks from Promoted Videos are in fact the video views (i.e. these clicks aren’t leading to your site) so it’s not desirable for these to be mixed with other clicks in your AdWords campaign.

To get the most of the price you paid for a promoted video view, it’s very useful to have every video properly described and tagged. You should also think about ways to get the user to view another video or – depending on your objectives – your website.

There are a few tools which can help you in building out your YouTube campaigns:

YouTube Insight can help you monitor things such as video views, demographics and subscribers.

Using YouTube Insights (Discovery) to understand video source traffic

There are also very interesting statistics which tell you what part of the overall video traffic is generated by advertising. You can then work out if there’s some synergy – i.e. if your advertising influences natural traffic to the video.

Do you need help promoting your business on YouTube? We can assist not only with YouTube advertising but also with complex SEO and SEM strategy. Contact us for a no-obligation chat.

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Apr 12 2011

Are you going to SMX This Thursday 14th April?

Published by Oakley under Marketing Events, Only AU, Search Engine Marketing

So last SMX event we caused a near stampede when we gave away a free iPad to one lucky small business owner. The time has come around again to attend one of the online marketing industry’s most popular conferences and share our latest research and thoughts with like-minded folk about all things ’search’.

This year our consulting team will be attending the 2 day event, you can speak with them at our booth (#17) or feel free to follow them around until they answer your pressing questions!

Our Head of Consulting, Mark Baartse will be presenting the changing dynamic of the relationship between DSPs and SEMs, this topic has been getting a lot of page-time in the marketing magazines of late so make sure you attend the SEO track in Ballroom 2 to catch what Mark has to add to the debate.

Danny Ng our Consulting Manager will be hosting Analytics 101’s in the Online Marketer Bootcamp @ 4:45 a must for those who are a little confused about the analytics packages out there and how to get the most out of them.

So get down to the Sydney Hilton, Thursday 14th & 15th April & more importantly don’t miss Mark’s presentation @ 1:30 in Ballroom 2.

Looking forward to seeing you there, if you can’t make it follow our live tweets from the event and we’ll be sure to post Mark’s presentation here after the event also.

@firstrateau

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Mar 28 2011

Press Coverage: Why you need SEM

Published by Oakley under In the news, SEO, SEO (AU), Search Engine Marketing, Search Engine Optimisation

Read Mark Baartse, Consulting Director of First Rate’s comments on one of the most important things that you need to know about SEM in this recent .NETT article by Luke Telford.

Every small business wants to get more online exposure for their brand online. This is why SEO is such a competitive industry. Businesses are constantly vying for the number one spot in search listings, but what many don’t know is that there’s more than one way to get there.
A term that is often used interchangably with SEO is SEM, or search engine marketing. SEM is significantly different to SEO, and it’s important for anyone who is trying to improve their search rankings to understand how each of the services can benefit their business in different ways.
Every time someone uses a search engine, they encounter SEM. SEM results are the highlighted links that appear at the top, and in a column to the right of search results. Advertisers pay to appear in the results for specified keywords. When a searcher clicks on their link, the advertiser is charged a commission by the search engine.
Kate Conroy, product specialist for AdWords at Google Australia, explains that SEM is essentially a way for businesses to buy ads or sponsored links on search engines.
“It’s distinct to SEO, which stands for search engine optimisation, which is about making your website more search engine friendly, so that it shows up higher higher in the organic, or free search engine lists,” she explains.
One major benefit to SEM is that it can provide a very quick turnaround in search results.
“SEM can give you immediate results,” explains Mark Baartse, consulting director of First Rate. “[It allows you to] respond a lot faster to changing market conditions, and you can respond a lot better to changing campaigns.”
“One of the most important things about SEM is that it’s a very quick way to get a presence on a search engine,” says Google’s Conroy. “When you buy sponsored links, or ads, on a search engine, you can often be up and running in under an hour, so you can have your ads showing very quickly. Whereas for SEO, generally it’s a very long-term project, so you may have to spend months or even potentially years making changes to your website and waiting to see if that will improve your results in search engines.”
Another benefit of SEM is that it allows you to control the exact details of the message that the searcher sees.
“With SEO, you can’t always control the page that people are going to end up on. With SEM you can,” says Conroy. “If you have a good understanding of your site, and which pages are likely to lead to something that’s going to cause a profit for the business – like buying something or coming in to visit your store – then SEM is going to give you greater control over that. You can put them in a place on your site where they’re more likely to drive the business’s bottom line.”
“Probably the big advantage with the SEM side of things is the real ability to tailor your marketing message,” explains Craig Somerville, managing director of Reload Media. “If you’ve got a great offer like ‘free delivery’ or ‘overnight shipping’, or if you’ve got a price point on a particular product, then you can get that across to the potential customer as they’re searching for that product, and display it to them in those four lines.”
SEM also allows businesses to set up a very specific way of measuring its return on investment.
“It gets to the point where you can actually track how profitable every single keyword you’re running is,” explains Somerville. “You can also track things like which ad messages are working best. You might find out for instance that free delivery is working better than overnight shipping, or that free gift wrapping is a better offer,” he continues. “So you can actually use SEM as a really good way to A/B split test your marketing messages which can then help drive other marketing strategies as well.”
The practical application that sets SEM apart from SEO is that it allows businesses to target short-term goals like marketing campaigns and promotional offers. Whilst the benefits of it are much more direct and measurable than SEO, explains Google’s Conroy, it shouldn’t be viewed as a replacement.
“We recommend for all businesses, if they’ve got the time and the budget, that they should be looking at both SEM and SEO,” she suggests.
One reason for this is that the cumulative effect of having the top ranking position in both paid and organic search generates more traffic than either would separately. “Let’s say that somebody types in a keyword for Katoomba Accommodation, and your business is actually showing on both the free listings and the paid listings, the clickthrough rate on both will go up, so it’s greater than the sum of its parts, just because you own more real estate on the page,” explains Conroy.
One criticism of using paid search is that most searchers just ignore the sponsored results, automatically blanking them out in favour of the ostensibly more relevant organic listings. Despite this, Conroy insists that the paid links do generate quite a lot of traffic, although the amount depends considerably on the nature of the searcher’s query.
“Say for example someone puts in a query like ‘history of the roman empire’. In that case we wouldn’t expect that many clicks on ads, as it’s not really something that’s commercial in nature,” she explains. “But if we have someone type in ‘car insurance’, then we would actually expect a significant portion of the traffic to go to ads, because people are looking for somethingsthat’s commercial, and the ads are meeting that commercial need, often in a way that the natural search results are not, because they’ll say things like ‘Get a 10 per cent discount if you buy car insurance online’ or something like that.”
Conroy reports that in her personal experience she’s seen clickthrough rates from anywhere between 1-2 per cent up to 50-60 per cent, especially for listings that target brand terms.
On the other hand, Reload’s Somerville has a more specific idea on the exact proportions between SEO and SEM clickthroughs.
“The average split is about 70 per cent SEO and about 30 per cent SEM,” he estimates. “But it depends on the search term. What we’ve found and what a lot of the other articles that have come out have shown is that SEM tends to be used by a more purchase-ready customer.”
Someone who’s at the information-gathering stage of the purchase cycle will probably favour organic listings over the paid results, elaborates Somerville.
“When the person actually gets ready to purchase stage, they’ll get to the point where they type in the exact make or model of the camera that they actually want,” explains Somerville, “and that’s where you’ve got to hit them with the targeted ad saying ‘this is the model you’re looking for, this is the price point, and a great offer like free delivery or guaranteed next day, or whatever it might be; that’s where we often see really good conversion rates on SEM, and that’s where the percentage of people clicking on paid ads actually goes up.”
Given this, many small business owners would no doubt like to know how many searches are commercial, rather than informational, in nature. Google’s Conroy explains that her company is also curious about this information, but has been unable to ascertain the exact figure itself.
“It’s a really tricky thing to do, because you need to discern a user’s intent from a query and often you get queries that could go either way,” explains Conroy. “If somebody’s searching for ‘Lamborghini’, for example, does that mean they want to buy one, or does that that mean they’re just a fan, and they want to read a fan site about other people who have this specific car. We’ve actually had people try and look at it, and we’ve found it hard to discern ourselves.”
See  the .NETT article here

follow mark on Twitter @markbaa

follow First Rate on Twitter @firstrateau

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Feb 23 2011

5 Handy Automated Rules to Incorporate into your Google AdWords Account

Published by David under Online Advertising, Search Engine Marketing

Just recently Google announced the release of AdWords Automated Rules to all accounts.

Automated Rules lets you schedule automatic adjustments to your AdWords account based on criteria that you specify. You can set automated rules at the various levels within your campaign:

  • Campaign level
  • Ad group level
  • Keyword level
  • Ad text level

The Automate feature can be found just below the historic graphs.



Below are some handy automated rules you can use on your own AdWords account:

1. Increase Daily Campaign Budget

To ensure you don’t miss out on growing demand for your product, this rule will automatically adjust your daily campaign budget (increase it by 10%) if the previous day’s spend has exceeded the campaign budget set.

This rule should be set on individual campaign level (Selected Campaign) and ‘Requirements – Cost’ needs to be updated every time it has been triggered. Email Alerts are essential so you are notified of this change.

The example below was used for a campaign with daily budget limit of $100, up to a maximum of $500.



Ideal for -

  • Campaigns with keywords being added consistently.
  • Campaigns with high volatility in search volume / seasonal demand.
  • Campaigns with low impression share.
  • Campaigns with increasing CPC.

2. Pause Poor Quality Score Keyword

It has been widely accepted by search advertisers that an AdWords account with a large proportion of low quality score keywords will have a negative impact on the entire account. This can be seen when a low quality score is given to a newly added keyword.

This rule will help you keep your account in optimal health by pausing keywords with poor quality scores, so you can evaluate them individually, either by updating the ad text, consider different match-types (both to improve CTR) or review landing page content (to improve relevancy). Again, it is essential that email alerts are setup to notify you of the changes.

The example below was used for an account wide automated rule to monitor poor quality scores keywords.

Ideal for –

  • Large AdWords accounts with 1,000+ keywords.
  • Accounts with tight CPA / CPC constraints.

3. Pause Non-Converting Ad Group or Keywords


In order to get the most out of your AdWords spend, it is essential that an account optimizer is continuously monitoring the performance of individual Ad Groups and Keywords, such that CPC bids are made against keywords that are converting, not against those that do not convert.

This rule will help you identify Ad Groups that are converting at below the minimum threshold, after it has reaches a statistically significant data level. The number of clicks required will depend on the search volume of the Ad Group and the length of the period the data is gathered.

The Ad Group rule below was an example utilized by First Rate to identify poor performing Ad Groups that did not meet the minimum (1-per-click) conversion rate of 12.5%, after it has reached 400 (statistically significant) clicks per ad group.

Note: Using this method will avoid automatic pause on Ad Groups that have low volume of clicks per month.


Ideal for –
  • Accounts with tightly themed Ad Groups.
  • Accounts with high search volumes.
  • ROI driven AdWords Accounts.

4. Pause Poor Performing Ads


Continuous Ad testing is by far one of the most effective ways to drive improvements to your AdWords account, and the speed of which you can change your marketing message on search engines is what gives this medium (one of) its competitive edge.

With the new AdWords Automated Rules, it gives an experienced Search Marketer an added tool to monitor ad test performance and make swift updates once the test has been completed.

The rule below is applied to an Ad Group, under-going a step-wise Ad tests with the goal of improving the Ad level CTR above 1.5% – the previous best performing Ad CTR. The rule will pause the ad that does did not achieve the minimum 1.5% CTR and notify me once the test has been completed (500 impressions per ad). Once a new ad has been added, you’ll need to update the CTR to the new best performing Ad CTR and continue testing.

Ideal for –
  • Accounts with a large number of Ad Groups / Product Types.
  • Keeping track of all Ad Testing experiment currently running and ensure Ads are being systematically updated.

5. Promote Converting Keywords


It has been generally accepted that increases in Ad Position will increase the number of visitors to your website and that conversion rate of the website is a constant from a given channel (i.e. Search Engines).

The rule below is set to find keywords that have been converting in the last 14 days, that is currently at a low Average Ad Position (below 3.5), and increase the bids gradually (by 5% increments) until it reaches an ad position between #3 & #4.

Ideal for –
  • Accounts when an increasing competition is pushing down your ads.
  • Optimised accounts with good ROAS to allow for increased CPCs.

If you have found another useful rule, please email us or make a comment below.

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Nov 17 2010

Implication of Google Instant Previews

Published by Zan under Industry Reports, Only AU, Search Engine Marketing

google-instant-previews-logo

Google announced last week that it had added a new feature known as “Instant Previews” to its search results page which would allow users to preview search results without having to click-through to visit the page…

Before delving into the possible implications of Instant Previews it is important to understand exactly what this new feature is all about.

About Google Instant Previews

Google Instant Previews provides a graphical overview of search results and in some cases includes call out texts that highlight relevant sections of the page making it easier for searchers to determine the context of a match from just the preview.

google instant previews example screenshot

Google argues that instant previews would allow users to easily compare search results and find the most suitable result. Tests carried out by Google revealed that people who use instant previews were on average 5% more satisfied with the search result they clicked on.

To activate Instant Previews click once on the preview icon next to any search result. Hovering over a search result, with instant previews enabled, displays a graphical preview of the page. To deactivate instant previews, click a second time on the preview icon.

Google instant previews attempts to include the most relevant sections of the page within the preview and uses torn edges to indicate sections of the page excluded from the preview.

Google Instant Previews Torn edges screenshot

Implications of Google Instant Previews

Outlined below are some of the ways in which Google Instant Previews might impact on websites and online businesses.

1 Decrease in website impression and keyword search volume

As users using instant previews are on average 5% more likely to be satisfied with the search result they click on, they are also less likely to continue searching which would result in decrease in website impressions and keyword search volume.

2 Decrease in natural search traffic

Instant Previews users are likely to filter out low quality and spam websites based on the page layout displayed in the preview. This will result in less traffic sent to low quality or poorly designed websites.

A less common scenario that could result in traffic loss for a site is the case where users find answers to their query within the call out text displayed in the preview without the need to visit the site as shown below.

google-instant-preview-direct-answer

3 Increase in conversion rate and decrease in bounce rate

Instant Previews is likely to result in lesser but more relevant traffic sent to websites which in turn would result in a lower bounce rate and higher conversion rate. Note that this does not imply an increase in conversion.

4 Less focus on the top search results

The ease at which users can preview search results might encourage users to browse further down the search results page bringing more focus to the search results within the middle to bottom section of the search results page.

5 Call Out text optimisation

A major feature of Instant Previews is the call out text included within the preview which if optimised has the potential to significantly improve the click through rate of a website.

6 Website layout and design optimisation

As  searchers on Google are likely to filter out low quality and spam websites using Instant Previews, the click through rate of a website can be improved through optimising the design and layout of the website.
At present, flash based content is not displayed within Instant Previews but Google says it is working on a fix to be released soon.

Google Instant Previews screenshot of flash not showing

Final thoughts and recommendations

Instant Previews is still in its infancy, however as more users begin to utilise this feature, we expect to see noticeable changes in the way people search and new ways to optimise websites around this new feature will become apparent.

The take up of Instant Previews is likely to be slow as it requires a level of curiosity on the part of the user to click on the preview icon to begin to use the Instant Previews feature, however this might be overcome through an education campaign by Google.

As an organisation it is important to make sure your search team or agency is aware of Google Instant Previews and the potential implications, and are keeping a close eye on your website metrics for out-of-the ordinary changes.

First Rate will continue to investigate into the possible impact of Instant Previews and look into ways in which to optimise client sites to take advantage of this new feature.

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