Commercials Drive Searches

Since the 2009 Super Bowl, I’ve monitored how the ads influence search interest, and every year, the trend has been the same. As people watch the Super Bowl, they search for everything they’re watching: teams, players, performers, and of course, commercials. The trend continues the day after the game as people talk about the commercials and turn to Google (and Bing) to watch them again. Take a look at the spiking searches for February 7th, the day after the game according to Google Trends:

Nearly every search is Super Bowl related, and searchers are clearly seeking out the ads. As you can see from search #8, commercials often cause people to search for the brands directly. Google Insights for Search shows that brands that advertised saw significant search spikes on Sunday. See for instance, the search volume for [bud light platinum].

They seemed to have really liked those ads in Iowa.

Google reported that searches for [super bowl ads] were 122 times higher this week and that the big search winners were Acura, GoDaddy, and M&Ms.

Where Are Advertisers Sending Potential Customers?

As I do every year, I took note of what advertisers included in the commercial. Did they include a web site URL? A Facebook page? Did they seem to even be aware of this crazy new thing called the internet? And then I looked at the advertisers’ search visibility. I was looking for the following flow:

Last year, many only paid attention to a flow like this:

I understand that Super Bowl commercials are about branding, not necessarily instant purchases, and I realize other positive outcomes exist (discussions on social media and the like). I’m just saying that if someone is searching for you, you may as well show up. And if you’ve gotten potential customers to view your commercial, you may as well make it easy for them to view more information about your products.

This year, many advertisers simply included their domain name in the ad (33 of the 53 advertisers I tracked did this). This approach can help cut out the search step, although as the response to the Dockers ad during the 2010 Super Bowl showed, advertising a URL causes people to, well, search for the URL. So you can’t always cut out the search step, no matter how hard you try.

Last year’s Super Bowl ads were all about Facebook fan pages (that often were impossible to find; don’t say “find us on Facebook” unless that’s an achievable task). This year, only fourof the ads included a nod to Facebook and all used actual URLs. Pepsi Max even went with an easy to remember redirect to Facebook: pepsimax.com/facebook.

Four commercials advertised Twitter hashtags (last year was the first year for this, and then it was mostly only for movie trailers). I was astonished to find that when a hashtag was included in a commercial, people instantly started using it to tweet about the commercial and the hashtag began trending. (As you can see, even the bands with songs in the commercials started trending.)

Of course, there’s a risk in this strategy. Things may go really well, as Audi found with #SoLongVampires, or very awry as Bud Light found with #MAKEITPLATINUM. (Did people really even use the same capitalization in the hashtag as was used in the commercial? Amazing.)

What began trending on Twitter also tended to show search spikes. For instance, take a look at searches for [echo and the bunnymen]:

So what we talk about, we also search for.

The Future is… QR Codes?

It may have seemed like GoDaddy used the same tired formula as always in their ads (although, apparently sex does sell, so I can’t knock sticking with something that works), but in fact, they tried something new this year: including a QR code in the ad.

The online version of the commercial includes the QR during the entire length of the ad, but when aired during the Super Bowl, it appeared only briefly at the end, so I’m not sure if  anyone managed to pull up the QR code reader on their mobile phone, rush to the TV, and scan it before it disappeared from the screen. Including it in the online version seems even more nonsensical though, as the idea seems to be that you’re watching the ad on your computer, see the QR code, scan it with your phone, and are brought to the godaddy.com site on your phone. I would guess that including a link to the web site in the commercial so that you can simply click and access the web site on your computer would make entering your credit card information for all those domain names quite a bit easier.

Scoring Search Visibility

So how did advertisers do in search? It’s difficult to come up with exact search coverage percentages. For instance, if a brand advertised multiple products and ranked well in search results for one product but not the other does the tick mark for that brand go in the yes or no column for search visibility? What if the product showed up for its name but not for its tagline?

For the purposes of the stats below, I used the following guidelines:

• I counted each brand once, even if they aired ads for multiple products
• If they ranked organically for at least one of brand, product, or tagline queries, I put a yes in the organic search column
• If they had a paid search ad for at least one of brand, product, or tagline queries, I put a yes in the paid search column

In a follow up column, I’ll point out some interesting choices, but for now, let’s just look at how well advertisers thought out web sites, search, and social media.

Of the 53 brands I tracked:

• 33 ended the ad with a URL to the brand site, 4 went with a Twitter hashtag, and 4 sent viewers to Facebook.
• 44 bought a paid search ad
• 51 ranked organically for the brand name (although far fewer ranked for the promoted taglines or hashtags)

Chrysler and YouTube

Last year, Chrysler’s Eminem ad was one of the most popular commercials of the game. I found it odd at the time that although they designed their site’s home page to tie in quite well to the vibe of that ad, they bought search ads to the commercial on YouTube. I felt they lost an opportunity to further interact with potential customers and lost some control of the experience (related videos could easily be to competitors, for instance). Their flow looked like this:

That’s not a bad outcome, but I thought that if they had used paid search to drive visitors to the commercial on their site, they might have been able to better leveraged the opportunity. This year, Chrysler once again had a much-talked-about ad, and they decided to mix things up a bit.

For [chrysler]-related searches, the paid search ad points at their home page, which is a great tie in to the commercial. But for other searches, they’ve once again chosen to promote YouTube.

This time, the YouTube link makes a lot more sense as it’s to the channel, so there are no competitor links and the entire page is focused on getting votes for the YouTube AdBlitz, engaging socially, and even includes an ad for the car featured in the commercial. All in all, I fully support this approach. They keep the branded searches pointing at their home page (after all, not everyone searching for the brand is searching for the commercial), which is tightly-integrated with the campaign, and they send those looking for the commercial to a page designed to specifically engage with them.  What a difference a year makes.

2012 Paid Search Ad to YouTube:

2011 Paid Search Ad to YouTube:

Acura NSX vs. Bud Light Platinum

We’ve already seen that the #makeitplatinum hashtag strategy both worked and didn’t work for Bud Light (they definitely got it trending, but for perhaps the wrong reasons). What about organic search visibility? Sadly, the brand web site doesn’t appear at all in Google for searches for [bud light platinum] (although they have bought a paid search ad to the YouTube page).

Acura NSX, on the other hand (which was a spiking search on Monday), does an excellent job with organic search, taking the top spot with a page devoted to it. (Although including the commercial on the page would have been a good idea.)

Overall, I felt brands did a much better job of keeping things simple and driving viewers to interesting, relevant pages that engaged them. Watch for my next post in the coming days for some specifics on what went right and spectacularly wrong.

(Stock image via Shutterstock.com. Used under license.)

Related:

• Super Bowl 2012: What Time Does It Start?
• Super Bowl 2011: Commercials and Search Visibility
• Super Bowl 2010: Commercials and Search Visibility
• Super Bowl 2009: Commercials and Search Visibility

There’s a great deal of data already in the market about SMB adoption of social media. What they show is that between 45 percent and 70 percent of SMBs say they already have a presence on social media sites (mostly Facebook).

Borrell reports that between 60 and 64 percent of SMBs have a formal presence on social media sites. An earlier 2011 study by Palore found that 58.2 percent of SMBs are on either Facebook or Twitter. And a late-November survey from MerchantCircle found that about 70 percent of SMBs said they promoted themselves using Facebook.

Borrell also found that social media marketing was just behind paid-search for SMBs in 2011. Given the ambivalence that many SMBs feel about paid search (though not organic) one could expect that social media advertising and other promotional spending would surpass paid search in 2012.

Borrell’s report estimates that roughly $6.2 billion was spent in 2011 on social media advertising (all in) and that Facebook captured or saw about 65 percent of that. The SMB-specific component of social media spending is smaller, roughly $1.14 billion, according to the report.

Another interesting piece of data in the report is the way that SMBs measure social media success or ROI. Most use “new customers” as the key metric (it’s not clear how many actively or successfully track that however). Additional fans/followers comes in at number two.

Borrell says, “On average each [SMB] has a network of more than 4,000 friends and followers. But this statistic is skewed by a few respondents who claim tens of thousands or more. Perhaps a better gauge is the median reported: about 250 followers.”

Yet even 250 fans/followers is probably more than a substantial percentage of SMBs have on their pages. The mid-2011 Palore study argued that about 38 percent of SMBs on Facebook had very few fans/Likes and very little engagement. The percentage of SMBs showing limited follower activity was even larger on Twitter (44.5 percent).

The Borrell report illustrates the increasing demand for social media marketing among SMBs. However it doesn’t explore the gap between that demand and the often ineffectual or inept social media efforts of those same businesses.

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Adobe has agreed to acquire digital marketing agency Efficient Frontier, which has a strong search marketing practice and technology to manage Facebook advertising. The companies didn’t disclose the terms of the deal.

The companies said Efficient Frontier would become a part of Adobe’s Digital Marketing suite, which includes technologies and services it acquired with web analytics and optimization firm Omniture in 2009.

Adobe has long been building up its capabilities in the digital marketing space, largely through acquisition. Earlier this month, it bought Auditude, a video ad management and monetization technology firm. In January, 2011, it purchased Demdex, a data management and audience optimization company. In July of 2010 the company got into web content management with the acquisition of Day Software.

Efficient Frontier began operations as a search marketing company helping large enterprise clients utilize algorithmic technology — using financial trading as a model — to maximize their investments in the space. Since its start, the company has expanded into other digital marketing arenas, notably including Facebook and display advertising.

Adobe says the Facebook and Search-related capabilities will be integrated into its existing Adobe SearchCenter+ offering, and the related analytics will be built into Adobe SocialAnalytics. Efficient Frontier also uses search-like optimization technologies in the display arena via ad exchanges. Adobe says these capabilities will work with the Digital Marketing Suite and its Dynamic Ad Targeting solution.

Efficient Frontier itself last month acquired Australia-based Downstream Marketing, which it called the largest provider of digital marketing technology and services in Australia. Efficient Frontier’s clients include BabyCenter, The Motley Fool, Bankrate, Ask.com, and Home Away/Holiday Rentals.

The acquisition will have to go through the usual government and board-of-director approvals, but Adobe expects it to close early in 2012.

No matter how you look at the data, that’s a lot of eyeballs and a lot of time spent on a single site that a marketer can take advantage of. But creating a video is only half the battle; attracting viewers is the other half.

YouTube Promoted Video Ads operate similar to Google search ads and offer advertisers a way to draw attention to a video, gain viewers and channel subscribers, and eventually influence downstream conversions. Promoted Videos show up according to visitors’ search results either at the top or to the right of the page.

Promoted Videos in YouTube

Additionally, with a Promoted Videos account, marketers can add overlays to their videos and link directly to their site, offer a promotion, etc. Given the popularity of video and YouTube, here are a few suggestions to best take advantage to YouTube Promoted Videos.

Create The Complete Package

First and foremost, to maximize your presence on YouTube you need good, engaging videos (not just one) and a YouTube channel to showcase them. Just as important – maybe even more so – to the videos are the video titles and descriptions as these will be used by YouTube to match your video with visitors’ search queries.

Once you have a channel with several videos, monitor the feedback and if a video achieves a good response, then it’s time to invest in promoting it.

Like other Google ads, Promoted Videos are managed through AdWords and follow a similar format to paid search.

When creating the ad, it’s imperative the thumbnail of your video and ad-copy reflect the nature of your video so as to attract the right audience. Words and concepts related to your video(s) should be used in the ad. The words “official” or “original” in a headline tend to increase views.

Choose Keywords Wisely

YouTube visitors are looking just for video content; consequently, search habits differ from traditional search. Given the difference, simply porting over keywords from search or display campaigns won’t have the desired effect.

Keywords must relate to the video you’re promoting, and thus should be chosen independently. YouTube offers advertisers a keyword suggestion tool that provides recommendations based on your video description, video id/url, or target demographic (in beta).

The tool will also give you an idea of the monthly search volume for each keyword so you can see which keywords visitors tend to use more often and incorporate them appropriately.

Like paid search, you can select between broad, phrase, exact or negative match types.

YouTube's keyword suggestion tool

Bidding Time

When it comes to keyword bidding on YouTube, think of it just as you would for search or display campaigns. You’ll want to set a conversion goal and determine what your expected volume and budget will be each month. Naturally, you’ll want to determine the value of each click. A third party bidding tool, particularly one integrated with your other SEM campaigns, proves useful in managing your YouTube bidding decisions and assessing the results of your promotions.

Don’t Forget The Overlay

One of the primary perks of running Promoted Videos is the ability to include an overlay ad in your video that appears at the bottom of your video while it plays. The overlay allows you to link from your YouTube video to an external site and is an invaluable technique for driving viewers to your site and transitioning them from learning about your brand to purchasing.

Overlays within a YouTube video are a great way to drive viewers to your site

Engage Your Viewers

YouTube is a social network. As such, a video provides you an opportunity to interact with your target audience. A successful video doesn’t just get a view, but also elicits a response.

If viewers ask for a follow-up video be sure to provide one, and if your video is shared by viewers on other social sites, be sure to respond as well. Responding and participating in the conversation with viewers allows you to strengthen your brand and may provide insight on how to create better videos.

As online video continues to grow, a strong presence on YouTube will become all the more critical to your marketing efforts. What’s been your experience with YouTube and Promoted Videos?

In life, timing can be everything. But in marketing, it can make the difference between a sale and a missed opportunity. That’s why the topic of recency is so important to marketers. Fortunately, search retargeting can help marketers capitalize on recency to drive performance.

Understanding Recency & The Window Of Opportunity

The concept of recency has been a key element in marketing for decades. It speaks to customer engagement in relation to time. For example, a consumer who interacted with your brand two days ago is more engaged and has a better recency score than someone who did the same a year ago.

In short, recency informs marketers about the window of opportunity to reach a consumer. I think industry legend Erwin Ephron said it best:

“… there is a window of opportunity for the ad message preceding each purchase. Advertising’s job is to influence the purchase. Media’s job is to put the message in the window.”

The Problem With Search & The Window

For today’s marketers, putting the message in the window is about using digital media to reach prospective customers at the optimum moment, when intent is expressed and they are in the proper mindset to receive your message and purchase your product.

While this is exactly what search does, it only addresses a small fraction of the effective recency window.

Why?

First, while search engines offer consumers immediate results to their queries, some conversations — depending on the vertical — require more detail or time to resonate with consumers.

In other words, to properly hit the window, advertising may need to be both now and later.

Second, only some initial offers get through — fewer than 5% of search results are actually ever clicked.

What Search Retargeting Can Do for Your Window of Opportunity

Search retargeting extends the brand conversation with a consumer beyond the initial point of exposure or expression of intent. Because of that, it gives marketers a better chance of hitting their window of opportunity.

In fact, some search retargeting solutions enable marketers to retarget consumers with granular recency settings that span from instant all the way to a full month out. Capitalizing on recency within search retargeting allows marketers to fine tune their efforts in regard to both timing as well as messaging. Doing exactly that will help them boost campaign performance.

Marketers can also improve performance in search retargeting by understanding how recency (the time between the search event and when an impression is served) impacts their success metrics, whether those metrics are CTR, CPC, ROAS, or something else.

The impact of recency will vary with different verticals, as well as with different campaigns within the same vertical. Once data is collected on the impact of recency on a particular campaign, it can be used to fine-tune campaigns.

Whether you use manual optimization efforts or automated multi-variate optimization algorithms, your recency data will help inform you, so you can raise bids for impressions within the valuable recency windows and lower bids for impressions outside of these windows.

The Impact of Recency On Search Retargeting Campaigns

In a recent study, Simpli.fi analyzed aggregate performance data for search retargeting campaigns over a 30-day period. We examined click-thru rates segmented by recency: delivery of impressions from Instant (on the page after the search results), all the way to 30-days post initial search.

The results indicate that the highest impression loads were delivered between one day and one week of identified intent, while the highest CTR performance was clustered within earlier stages of exposure, 30 minutes or less. And while such aggregate data is interesting, the more powerful data speaks to how recency impacts individual campaigns.

For example, the study shows that the tech vertical tends to favor a shorter recency window than the clothing vertical, but within those verticals different types of keywords (eg, upper funnel vs lower funnel) can perform differently.

How To Make Recency Work for Your Retargeting Campaigns

Below are four tips to help you best capitalize on recency in your search retargeting campaigns, whether these adjustments are made manually or “automagically” by optimization algorithms:

1.  Start with long windows, refine to shorter windows

2.  Analyze recency by vertical and campaign

3.  Analyze recency by keyword type

4.  Adjust based on your goals

Overall, by leveraging recency with search retargeting, marketers have a better shot at hitting their window of opportunity and boosting their campaigns’ performance. Smart marketers will be sure to tap into recency with their search retargeting efforts.

But does this overlap really exist, and does 1+1 really equal 3, or does is it actually just equal 2?

In order to find out the answer, I recently asked several experienced figures within our industry for their insights and comment.

• AKQA Media – Drew Wahl, Director of Business Development
• Booyah Advertising – Emily Iverson, Director of Display Media
• ethology – Jeff Pruitt, CEO (and former President of SEMPO)
• iCrossing – Chris Wallace, SVP Media

Each of these people are knowledgeable in both types of media, and are actually involved in the oversight of plans or teams where both display planning and search engine marketing are occurring, and our thanks to them for taking part in this discussion, the conclusions from which are published below (the full, unedited responses can be viewed in their entirety here).

Each contributor was asked the same two questions:

1. Is there really an overlap between search and display that benefits campaigns, or is it just hypothetical?
2. If there is, what are those benefits and what advice would you give a search marketer to capitalize on them?

A Convenient Story

Early in my agency days, I remember adding a slide to my overview display deck that stated (in a big, bold font of course) that ‘1+1=3’ and would wax lyrical about how we had an integrated media offering. I stood by my slide, believing that marketing across SEM and display as isolated channels could not be the right approach. In my mind, each channel had a halo effect on the other and this surely must create additional value for the advertiser.

I would quote the usual studies that demonstrated this uplift in return of anything from 2.4x to 10x when adding a display buy to a search program, but true behavioral insight always seemed to be lacking in those studies. And so a question remained in my mind as to why and how this effect occurred, and what strategies were best at making it happen.

1+1 = Something More Than 2

All our contributors report seeing real benefit from running display and search programs together in ways that help explain the mythical halo effects we have seen for years, but also that reveal themselves with quantifiable measurements.

At ethology, Jeff reports seeing that individuals will search multiple times on multiple keywords before they make a decision. This consideration window is clearly prime time for a marketer; it is the “opportunity to expose [individuals] at different points during the research experience with very targeted display that result in a higher likelihood to take an action”.

With each individual performing more searches than ever before, this window is broad, creating a greater chance a competing brand could steal that customer for themselves. Display is a tool to combat this potential leakage.

The effect of this window is measurable too according to iCrossing’s Chris Wallace. They have seen situations where this repeated exposure has led to an increase in branded search queries that has “an efficient and meaningful impact on digital campaigns”, a logical outcome when we think about how during that research phase an individual will often start with a broad query (“chicago hotel”) before narrowing it down to a solution (“doubletree hotel Chicago rates”). And if that is the case, it means we can look beyond generalizations and start to quantify.

Whilst these points suggest that display is merely increasing the frequency of an event that was occurring anyway, AKQA Media have built a digital analytics platform that is seeing users across multiple channels and is showing cases where individuals are performing brand searches that would not have done so without first having the display exposure. Clearly these agencies are able to prove today that the benefits are real.

Universal Advice – Measurement Matters

In terms of advice from the experts of what you should do, the message is loud and clear – measurement is going to be critical to understanding the overlap, but it is also not going to be easy.  The ideal solution is an attribution model that can see all your marketing investments and sort through the results to understand how each one influenced every transaction.

In previous articles,we have discussed though how this is often not possible, and at the very least is cumbersome.

With a need to measure something though, you must cut through the clutter and find something that works for you, a process that involves understanding the difference between on site and off site interactions.

At Booyah Advertising, Emily’s team will look at standard metrics such as CTR and CPA but also carry out incremental lift studies with partners like Chango in order to examine the percentage of interaction from each channel that is incremental – this helps to get a read on the maximum potential impact one channel could be having on another.

Clearly this is a good starting point, and is probably the easiest for you to report on internally – “we launched display and saw a a 20% increase in our CTR in search” for instance.

These metrics are primarily occurring and being measured off site though, they are at the point of exposure to the campaign itself. Agencies iCrossing and AKQA both responded to the questions with points that demonstrate how the behavior of individuals changes for the better ON the client’s site if they are first exposed to both search and display campaigns.

This can be measured by looking at ‘engagement metrics’ from incoming traffic such as time on site, pages visited and a very interesting point from ethology, the time to convert.

Be Prepared

So now we know that the overlap exists, that it is quantifiable, and even where we should look for the signal of evidence, should you go out and add display to your search program immediately?

Chris thinks not, and instead would “advise marketers to consider a measurement strategy BEFORE campaign launch that will be used to evaluate search and display’s combined impact during the campaign – this method allows for adjustments to made before campaigns terminate and allows for improvements to had within the campaign flight period.”

This is sound advise, especially given that in order to be looking at the overlap you must make use of unique IDs that can be read across channels, something that requires technical investment and careful planning.

Conclusion

The result of the equation, 1+1, does indeed equal more than 2, and with careful thought and measurement, quantifiable metrics can be discovered that will help you understand the exact answer for your own campaigns – best if planned in advance.

Clients working with AKQA Media, Booyah Advertising, ethology and iCrossing are benefitting from working with experienced and integrated teams who know how to bring these things together, and advanced techniques like search retargeting capitalize on the best of both of these worlds, and are helping all 4 agencies take this integration a step further.

According to Jeff, “advertisers that don’t take the next step to build or obtain systems that allow the search advertisers to manage the two channels in a centralized technology that appropriately attributes the impact each channel has on performance and conversions, will not be fully maximizing their advertising spend and the resulting actions.”

Feel it’s a lot of work? As Emily plainly states, the overlap is real, and if you don’t believe it then “pause one of your campaigns (search or display) and measure the drop in your key performance indicators, see for yourself!”

AdWords advertisers must use Call Metrics and a Google Voice-generated call tracking number to participate. But rather than just paying $1 per completed call for call tracking, advertisers can now separately bid on calls.

In the near future, depending on the amount of bids and how many calls are received, Google will begin to include calls in its ads quality score. I spoke to Google’s Surojit Chatterjee who told me advertisers that don’t participate in bid for calls won’t be disadvantaged. But advertisers whose paid-search ads are generating lots of calls may see a boost in their AdWords rankings accordingly.

In other words, “call-through rate” will now be a factor in ranking. To participate in bid for calls advertisers enable Call Extensions and Call Metrics:

Last year when Google’s call tracking program “Call Metrics” was first introduced I suspected PPCall wouldn’t be far behind. Google experimented with PPCall on the PC years ago but never rolled it out broadly.

Despite its relatively low-key introduction this morning, this is a major development for Google and for AdWords advertisers. Being able to bid on calls separately as well as getting ranking “credit” for calls generated from Google ads will be significant for many advertisers (local and national) that operate call centers or have stores in the real world.

When the principle was first explained to me, I was running an agency display media team at a search agency that was focused on direct response clients; I was therefore interested in tactics that involved precise data points as a way to focus on user intent.

Search retargeting seemed to fit the mold perfectly: target just those individuals with display ads who have actually searched for the terms that were relevant to the client, eliminating nearly all wastage from the plan.

We were building what we called the agency’s “foundation layer” of display: site retargeting to fix on-site conversion, search retargeting to prospect and plug the leak from SEM, and social retargeting to add further scale to the audience. So we picked five clients who had a pre-agreed testing budget and rolled out search retargeting with an early vendor, only to see four out of five of the campaigns bomb!

The primary reason was that in Search Retargeting 1.0, there was no scale in the data and little effort invested in the media placement. The campaigns were great when spending $100, but as soon as the vendor tried to scale to fill the budget, they would have to broad match and lose the relevancy, and of course the ROI.

Growing The Data – Search Retargeting 2.0

But sticking with it, campaigns began to perform better over time, and in almost direct correlation with the quantity of data that was available. Now we could focus more on the relevant terms and ignore some of the broad head terms. And as any search marketer can tell you, volume comes from the broad terms, but ROI comes from the specific. With data volume no longer such a problem, search retargeting 2.0 was on the horizon.

The theory states that search retargeting should outperform most other display placements because of its accuracy, and even come close to the performance of your search marketing efforts — as an industry it simply was not there yet.

But with the intersection of search and display looking like the future of digital, I left the agency to go help make this work.

The Data High

Too many marketers went through a phase of being high on data, believing that a single reference point was all that was needed to generate great DR results. They lost sight, in their excitement, of the continuing importance of creative messaging and the context of the media placement. Knowing who to talk to is important, but doing that in the right environment and with the right story really matters.

As popularity in search retargeting grew, so did the funding, which allowed the successful players to build their own DSP (Demand Side Platform) technology to manage the quantity of data and build in these essential elements. Marrying thousands of keywords with thousands of potential ad placements is not easy though, particularly when you have to do it in real time and at the keyword level.

Advanced Optimization — Search Retargeting 3.0

In a recent Chango search retargeting campaign from a large retailer, the need for keyword level optimization is clear:

Search retargeting example 1:

• ‘clothes shop’ — CTR of 0.87%
• ‘clothes shopping’ — CTR of 0.25%

Search retargeting example 2:

• ‘shoes mens’ — 0.16%
• ‘mens shoes’ — CTR of 0.21%

The search marketer is used to a world where this type of analysis is commonplace, but what is different is the choice of media sources.

In SEM, you choose from two major engines and then can add the extended network, usually by just ticking a box and forgetting it. But with real-time display, including search retargeting, we can buy in excess of 100,000 QPS (Queries Per Second — a simple measurement of media capacity).

Therefore managing search retargeting campaigns today is complex. Typically a campaign will need to be optimized manually once a day, but then “machine learning” must be used to balance the multitude of options available.

In our examples above, the term “clothes shop” clearly had a better type of intent that “clothes shopping” for our client, but that could only be determined by analyzing the placement on tens of thousands of sites. The balance of people and technology provide the scalable solution (but interestingly also blur the line between agency and vendor).

In addition, search retargeting 3.0 leverages dynamic creative, but unlike a typical dynamic setup, there is actual search data to work with, producing richer and more relevant experiences for the end consumer. Search retargeting sprang out from a sea of providers buying on the exchanges, but now seems to be leading in terms of what can really be achieved.

A Blessing & A Curse

Search retargeting would probably not be the name our micro-industry chooses if it got to choose again. When media planners hear it they immediately get excited, as they know a good media plan should always include some type of retargeting. But their first assumption is that it targets their existing site visitors. Many conversations begin by saying this isn’t the retargeting you thought it was!

But once marketers understand, they see its value for the long term. Like site retargeting and the SEM program itself, it typically becomes an evergreen program, running continuously as a reliable source of revenue.

In Summary …

Search retargeting arrived on the media scene less than two years ago, and less than one year ago for most media planners. It leverages the power of search and executes it with the scalability of display. It is enormously complex because of the volume of both keywords and media placements, so early campaigns were often not successful (v1.0). But as the industry grew, so did the data, and with it came a certain amount of reach (v2.0).

Today, major brands invest hundreds of thousands per month on evergreen and seasonal campaigns in search retargeting thanks to the results that in-house DSP bidding technology allows for true keyword level granularity. Machine learning, dynamic creative and lots of experience means that version 3.0 is upon us … and growing.

Why is this so shocking? Placing search ads inline with organic free listings is somewhat taboo for search companies.

Years ago, search engines had “paid inclusion” programs which guaranteed content to be indexed, but they had no ranking factors. In fact, Yahoo after much controversy dropped their paid inclusion program in 2009.

But to allow advertisers to inject ads with guaranteed rankings in the organic results seems unethical to me.

Danny scolded Google for doing a form of this within Google Product Search.

If you look at the ads here, they are almost completely blended into the organic results that they look to be completely unbiased, free, organic listings. The “ad” label all the way on the right can be completely missed.

I have emailed Microsoft for a statement on this and to confirm this is a real test. I will follow up as soon as I hear back.

Postscript: Microsoft has confirmed this is a test they are running. A Microsoft spokesperson said:

We’re constantly testing and experimenting on Bing, and with that, we carefully measure user engagement and reaction to these changes. We have nothing further to share at this time.

Related Articles:

• Yahoo To Drop Paid Inclusion Program
• Ask.com’s CEO, Jim Lanzone, Calls Yahoo Paid Inclusion “Hypocritical”
• Google Experiments With Paid Inclusion & Does “Promoted” Meet FTC Guidelines?
• Drill, Baby, Drill: Google Finance Gets Ads; Google News Testing Them

Using the real-time environment of the media exchanges, ‘search retargeting’ is one of several techniques that has created a safe bridge for SEM marketers to move into display and see almost instant results, and it is the SEM budget holders that are trying it quicker than the media planners (and who often sit in the same agencies!)

Source: Chango.com

This week, we are going to explore the use of search retargeting in more detail and why the optimization work you have already done in your SEM program can be used to drive significant results from a display campaign, save you budget and find new prospects.

As an example, we have a client today who is in the final stages of constructing their back-to-school campaign. They are new to this particular market and so have no real SEO presence, a budget that doesn’t allow for a heavy presence on SEM head terms and they don’t yet understand the dynamics of their new customer.

Building The Campaign Structure

Like any good SEM program, structure for search retargeting is critical to getting the best results. The goal is to create manageable sets of keywords that mirror to your business, facilitating budget decisions, optimization strategies and measurement. Where some keywords might be on an evergreen strategy, others might be seasonal or receive only occasional funding.

For our back to school client, they have a layer of critical terms that are ‘always on’, but will soon be activating a new set of campaigns to hit this seasonal window – Backpacks, School Supplies, School Clothing and Small Electronics for College Students.

There is no need to duplicate your previous efforts though. In this case, all the campaigns and ad groups can be imported directly, overcoming 80% of the work.

Next, the program must take into account the areas where search retargeting behaves differently to your search program. In a recent infographic by WordStream, the top 20 most expensive terms on Google AdWords were listed and ranged from $27.80 CPC (for ‘cord blood’) to $54.91 (for ‘insurance’). But, these are all terms available for between $0.50 and $3.00 CPC in the less competitive world of search retargeting.

With testing, there will be head terms such as these that no longer make sense to include in an SEM program, consuming large percentages of the budget. Instead, they can be moved to this new type of targeting, creating a presence in the mind of the searchers on contextually relevant sites.

For the back to school client with small budgets, terms like ‘school’, ‘term’, ‘clothes’ and ‘laptop’ have been moved over completely.

Compete With The Big Boys & Build Brand Cost Effectively

We know that customers are already shopping on the big name sites for common school items like backpacks and clothing without giving our client a second thought. By adding in competitor brand terms, they can build a presence during the research phase cost effectively and steal some of those dollars.

However, that alone will not be enough for them. When I was on the agency side, we would regularly have requests to ‘build a national brand campaign for a new audience’ using a budget that was painfully too small!

Whilst a true ‘branding’ campaign costs real dollars and a sustained period of time, search retargeting can be used to create a short awareness program for a fraction of the cost of other techniques. Display planners have long used the ‘takeover’, the idea that a single website can be owned for a day, giving the campaign a big hit in one go. These are costly though, and contain a significant amount of wastage.

By selecting a core set of terms, you can build an ‘Intent Takeover’, creating a heavy presence in front of all those people who are actively in market for back to school products. You can have the benefit of the page or site takeover, but for a fraction of the cost.

Learning From Search Retargeting

For a new client like ours, there is much to be understood about who their customer actually is, and so learnings are very valuable.

With keyword level reporting for search retargeting, a client like this can test many approaches at low cost by building out large keyword lists and seeing how the audience responds. This data can then be fed back into the SEO and SEM strategy.

In a recent retailer example, the term ‘vintage clothing’ was a surprise winner, and with the back to school client, early tests are showing video game terms are getting them in front of the right people.

Use What You Have

As a search marketer, you are armed with all the right tools and skills to jump into display, and techniques like search retargeting will be most familiar, and will capitalize most on the hard work you have already done.

Start by setting up your campaign using your SEM ad groups and insist on optimization at the keyword level – just as with SEM, each keyword carries a different message of intent and naturally has to be treated uniquely.

Next, look at creating new groups of keywords that lack a proper presence in your search program, such as competitor brand names or broad head terms.

Once the campaign is live, data will start to flow back showing the sites and keywords that are driving the best results – go back to your SEM program and use this information to your benefit.