The broad modifier feature was rolled out in July 2010 in the U.S and was mostly aimed at scaling up those accounts not already using regular broad match type. Search marketers have to then build new broad keywords using “+” signs to effectively unlock the broad modifier feature.

Because it requires some time and effort, not all advertisers have actually implemented this feature – particularly those advertisers already using broad match type. Some of our clients reluctant to use standard broad match type did test broad modifier, and it turned out that it performed surprisingly well – with an incremental revenue volume up to 15% while maintaining efficiency on target.

The new matching behavior for exact and phrase match types announced on April 17th  (and just rolled out last week) is going one step further since it potentially impacts all advertisers by automatically updating the default matching behavior from standard exact and phrase matching to a more lenient matching behavior including plurals, misspellings, and other close variants.

In that sense, it can be seen as a logical sequel to the broad modifier feature. Advertisers have the option to opt out – however, most of them will allow the update to occur.

There has been a lot of speculation and skepticism about the latter one, as it seems it is just another way for Google to generate more ad revenue. Hence the question: what are the first takeaways a couple of days after the new matching behavior roll-out?

Where Can I See The Impact In AdWords?

While I couldn’t find any details in AdWords about those incremental queries corresponding to “plurals, misspellings and other close variants” in AdWords, you can now see that the “Other search terms” section shows impressions and clicks even for exact keywords:

In this particular case (a strong trademark keyword in exact match), we have measured an impressive 18% lift in impressions at a stable CTR. Conversions did follow with a slightly higher conversion rate and a slightly lower cost per order – not significantly though.

Overall Impact On Traffic & Conversion Volume

In this section, I will attempt to answer two questions: what is the average impact on traffic? And what is the average impact on conversion volume?

According to Google: “on average, the new matching behavior increased AdWords search clicks by 3%, with comparable CPCs”. Looking at 15 top brands managed through eSearchVision’s proprietary search query report, early findings show that clicks from queries not containing the actual keywords actually increased by 3.5/4.5% on average with comparable CPCs.

More specifically, the below graph shows that the percentage of clicks generated through exact and phrase without close variants has slightly decreased, while the percentage of “All Other Queries”, i.e. when the keyword is not included in the query, has increased from 23% on average the week before the roll-out up to roughly 26-29% the week after.

In the meantime, conversions have increased by 2.0/3.0% on average. However we can expect this number to go slightly up over time due to the post-click effect – since users who clicked over the last couple of days are likely to convert in the next couple of days or even weeks.

Main Takeaway

The new exact and phrase matching behavior seems relatively promising so far. As expected (and even a bit more than expected) we’re seeing more impressions and clicks at a stable CPC, as well as incremental conversions, even though conversions are not following as fast as the clicks for the time being.

As a result, search marketers no longer need to create additional keywords using the broad modifier feature. The new matching behavior seems to be doing pretty much the same job with no effort. Just keep an eye on search query performance and maybe add more negative exact and phrase keywords if you identify any poor performing or irrelevant queries since this roll-out.

Since they previously migrated all Yahoo algorithmic search results to Bing, the transition is now complete in these countries. The migration has been underway since February.

Next up for the transition comes Germany, Austria and Switzerland. Yahoo and Microsoft will start working with partners to make the change this month. The companies have typically offered migration assistant software, to help smaller Yahoo Search Marketing advertisers make the switch with as little pain as possible.

Previously, the Search Alliance migrated advertisers in North America and India.

The migration of advertisers follows the transition of all algorithmic results worldwide, on desktop and mobile, in 2011.

Besides the name change, marketing collateral and web sites will incorporate the large beautiful images that the Bing consumer site has become known for — to unify the brand experiences.

“Previously, there was just a lot of confusion around our brand,” Matt Lydon, general manager of Microsoft’s SMB Advertising group, told me.

The branding doesn’t need to be changed for larger enterprises and agencies because they already have account managers at Yahoo, via the Search Alliance relationship, who can explain how everything fits together. However, for small businesses, there was a big disconnect between the consumer Bing brand and what happened when they try to advertise on the search engine.

Small businesses are a particularly important audience for Bing, given the strength of Google AdWords among smaller advertisers. Since many of these folks are acting as CEO, CFO and CMO in their small businesses — not to mention running operations — it’s a challenge to get them to devote attention to a second PPC solution. Microsoft is hoping making things easier to understand will lower some of the existing barriers.

The company has already rolled out a new branded landing page for small- and medium-sized businesses, building on other efforts it’s making to simplify everything to attract these marketers. Lydon says it’s his group’s top priority and one of the top two priorities for engineers, as well.

Part of that effort has been to simplify the sign-up process for new advertisers. Previously, the company had “somewhere in the neighborhood of 14 to 20 pages” of information to fill out to sign up for an account. It took around 20 minutes. “We now have that down to two pages and five minutes,” Lydon said.

Additionally, the company is working to hide away some of the advanced — and more complicated — functionality in adCenter, hoping to make it easier to understand for new advertisers.

“We make them [the advanced features] available, but they [the advertisers] don’t get hit with all that in the initial phase,” said Lydon.

The new branding will be rolled out on web pages and marketing collateral that goes to current small- and medium-sized advertisers first, and will slowly be rolled out to every other communication platform, including those aimed at bringing aboard new businesses. On something public-facing like Facebook, the company will have two separate pages — Bing for consumers and Bing Business for advertisers.

I was talking to Lehmbeck about mobile search trends and what kinds of consumer response he was seeing to various campaigns. Lehmbeck gave me some unpublished, internal data that I’m now sharing in this post. He said that mobile paid search “looks like much like search advertising did in 2001.”

15 to 25 Percent Mobile Paid Search Traffic

Between 15 percent and 25 percent of paid search traffic is now coming from mobile devices according to Lehmbeck. He adds however, “In local-heavy categories, such as dining, auto services and entertainment this number jumps to 50 percent or more.” He says that with the rise of smartphones “consumer engagement [with mobile search] has gone through the roof.”

Lehmbeck points out that online-only retailers are also starting to use mobile to nab in-store shoppers. “As mobile queries grow and these brands start to create highly optimized mobile experiences, this trend will only continue.” Lehmbeck told me that traffic to e-commerce sites via mobile is somewhat lower than the average (5 percent to 15 percent) but that some e-commerce sellers are seeing a “great ROAS” (return on ad spent).

Much “More Attuned to Location” in Ad Copy

Mobile consumers are “much more attuned to location in ad copy” than online search users according to Lehmbeck. “When a user searches with implied local intent, ads that leverage geographic indication tend to perform better.” Searches like “garden supplies” or “furniture store” are in this category.

Explained Lehmbeck, “We have seen some very strong results for ads that reference location or local offers, especially those that do it in an intelligent way (e.g. “Your Garden Superstore – Take 20% Off in Our Los Angeles Locations This Weekend” or “Locate Your New Sofa – Over 15 Furniture Galleries in Los Angeles to Serve You”).” These ads see 50 percent greater engagement than ads do not indicate where to buy or what specific offers are available in their area.”

Offline Conversions Boost Sales 5 to 10X

I’ve written in the past about the offline impact of paid search. It’s rarely tracked and so the true ROI of many campaigns is probably quite a bit higher than what is being calculated. Lehmbeck told me, “In some rare but very interesting cases [paid search marketers] are tracking it down to the offer level in conjunction with our platform and they have seen 5 – 10X sales when accounting for in-store conversions.”

Lembeck counsels marketers to “build out better mobile experiences and get a deeper sense of what the right metrics are for understanding the true ROI of mobile ad spend.” Indeed, recent data from Marin Software showed higher CTRs for smartphones but much lower conversions than for PC search campaigns. However that’s likely because mobile search conversions weren’t being tracked offline.

DataPop CEO Jason Lehmbeck will be presenting on the iConvert panel at SMX Advanced in Seattle next month.

“We’re changing the design layout of our hotel, flight, credit card and bank account results, which help users complete actions such as booking flights quickly and easily,” a Google spokesperson told us in a statement. “We’ve always disclosed that Google may be paid when a user completes such an action; we want to be clear and consistent in how we do that.”

The New Look

The comparison units appear in the US when people do these types of searches:

• Flight search
• Hotel search
• Financial product search for checking accounts, savings accounts, credit cards or certificates of deposits

In the UK, the units only appear for financial products, specifically for current accounts, savings accounts and credit cards.

Again, the units aren’t new. They’ve existed for over a year for some products. They’re simply getting a new format. Below is an example of the old-style look, which some may still see now:

Here’s an example of how they are changing to over the coming days:

In the new format, the background color that’s used for Google’s traditional AdWords units is gone. The comparison units also carry a “Sponsored” disclaimer rather than an “Ads” one, as with AdWords ads. This seems part of Google’s positioning the new units as something different than ads.

Not Ads, Not Organic Listings But A “Third Kind Of Thing”

Indeed, even though Google’s called these “comparison ads” in the past, it pushed back on that label for them now. What are they called? We’ve yet to get a formal name for them. In talking with us about them today, Google referred to the units as a “third type of thing” — not organic listings, and not ads but something in between.

Clicking on the comparison link will take users to a results page in the relevant vertical search product, be it Google Hotel Finder, Google Flight Search or Google Advisor.

The distinction between these and ads, Google told us, was that advertisers control the keywords, the copy and the links in AdWords. In the results generated by the comparison units, Google decides what listings get displayed and how they get displayed, based on aggregate data that advertisers provide. In most cases, Google gets paid for leads it sends.

While the comparison ads site is still up and shows the program as in beta, participation isn’t open to any advertiser as with AdWords, not does it seem likely to be.

Google says those who want to be in the flight area, or the hotel area or in the financial products area will either already be approached by the right team in Google or know the team to contact. In short, if you don’t know the right place to talk to, apparently you aren’t the right company for these types of ads.

Organic, Paid Placement & Paid Inclusion Listings

This “third Kind of thing” will sound familiar to veteran search marketers. It’s paid inclusion. For those new to the concept, a refresher.

For the most part, Google (as well as Bing) has two different types of search listings. The first are “editorial” or “natural” or “organic” listings, the “main” listings that people tend to think of as the search engine’s results. Google doesn’t charge for people to show up in this space. Its search algorithms try to determine the most relevant sites to list for any particular search.

There are also paid listings, the listing powered by AdWords, where advertisers bid against each other to appear above or to the right of the organic listings. Because these ads grew out of advertisers trying to gain prominent placement, they’ve historically been called “paid placement” ads, even though with Google, advertisers can’t guarantee that their ads will rank well for any particular term, even if they’re willing to pay the most. An ad algorithm takes payment along with overall relevancy into account.

Paid inclusion was once a popular way that the major search engines like Yahoo or Bing’s predecessor MSN Search charged sites to help increase the odds they might perform well within organic search results.

You couldn’t buy a top ranking, but you could pay to ensure more of your pages were gathered up or revisited on a regular basis. It was kind of like buying more tickets for a lottery. You aren’t guaranteed to win, but you can buy more chances.

Google was long the major search engine that stood against paid inclusion, even calling out against paid inclusion as part of its 2004 IPO filing. Microsoft and Ask, feeling the pressure, dropped their paid inclusion programs that year. Yahoo — the last holdout — dropped its program in 2009.

So what’s up with paid inclusion happening at Google, which fought against it before?

Paid Inclusion In The Vertical Space

It’s important to note that paid inclusion is not happening in Google’s main web search results. At the time Google fought against paid inclusion, that was largely where it was happening. Since then, paid inclusion has moved into the province of smaller specialty search engines, where it remains common. Other search engines in vertical spaces, like Kayak.com and Mint.com, include data from companies with which they have financial relationships. Even Bing does this.

Google has come close to paid inclusion in the past with some mixture of sponsored listings in things like shopping and local results, but in talking today with the company, it seems it may be closer to this for some newer search products than ever before, if it’s not already there. I’d argue that it is.

To be clear, Google may have “free” information listed in any of these areas because of data feeds it pulls in or some crawling it does of the web. But it was clear the intention for these products is really to be building a way to compare between services from companies that Google has a commercial relationship with. That’s a fairly big departure from Google’s traditional search products. Google News, for example, doesn’t only feature newspapers that purchase inclusion. Nor does Google Shopping only list merchants that pay to be considered.

Google Hotel Finder, launched last year, appears to be a hotel search engine similar to how Google has a search engine for finding images or videos or web pages. But unlike those other search engines, from talking with Google, it seems most if not all the content in Google Hotel Finder is for companies that it has a commercial relationship with or hopes to have one with — a commercial relationship meaning Google gets paid for leads.

Google Flight Search which also launched last year seems the same situation. Google was unclear about whether businesses were listed for free within the area or why some airlines had booking options or not, if that was only for those with commercial arrangements.

As for Google Advisor which rolled up various financial product searching tools last year, individual sections, such as the credit card area, currently say that Google isn’t paid for offers shown. Yet this area powers the comparison units in Google that are expressly noted as sponsored. Google told us the wording in Google Advisor is being updated, after we pointed out this mismatch.

Will More Paid Inclusion Come To Google?

Even though paid inclusion is fairly commonplace in the vertical space, it still feels somewhat surprising for Google to be doing it. Having a search tool for financial products using paid inclusion even goes directly against what Google’s founders said they disliked back in 2004, as part of the IPO filing’s “Don’t Be Evil” section:

Google users trust our systems to help them with important decisions: medical, financial and many others. Our search results are the best we know how to produce. They are unbiased and objective, and we do not accept payment for them or for inclusion or more frequent updating.

It makes me wonder if future Google vertical search products will go down this route. I’ll be following-up more with Google about this in the near future.

Pamela Parker contributed to this story. 

Related Articles

• Yahoo To Drop Paid Inclusion Program
• Open Letter To Google: Do The Right Thing, Divest Yourself Of Performics
• Google Experiments With Paid Inclusion & Does “Promoted” Meet FTC Guidelines?
• Google Blurs The Line Between Paid & Unpaid Results Again
• Bing’s Travel Search & Kayak Favoritism Angers No One, While Google’s Gets Headline Attention From WSJ
• Google Goes Big For Financial Comparison Shopping, Launches “Google Advisor”
• Search For Hotels With Google Hotel Finder
• Google Travel Search Takes Flight With First ITA Travel Product

Social Media Examiner announced the results of its fourth annual survey, which this year had replies from more than 3,800 social media marketers around the world.

When asked what other marketing channels they use, search engine optimization (SEO) was the No. 2 response behind e-mail marketing. Paid search — or “online ads” as the survey called it — was far down the list at number six. Sixty-five percent of social media marketers say they use SEO, compared to only 38 percent who use paid search advertising.

B2B social marketers were slightly more likely to do SEO (67 percent) than their B2C counterparts (62 percent).

Going forward, 68 percent of respondents said they’re planning to increase their SEO efforts — a number that’s down slightly from 71 percent in 2011. Only nine percent this year said they have no plans to use SEO.

Only 43 percent of the social media marketers surveyed say they’re planning to increase their use of PPC advertising.

As you’d expect, Facebook was the No. 1 social networking site with 92 percent adoption. Google+ was a distant sixth, but most respondents say they’re planning to use Google+ more in the future. I’ve written up more about that aspect of the study on Marketing Land: Survey: Only 40 Percent Of Marketers Are Using Google+, But Many Plan To Change That.

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

Between iOS and Android there are more than 900,000 apps. App discovery is now a major problem for both consumers and developers — hence the new advertising option on Appolicious. Chomp was planning to introduce a similar capability and then was bought by Apple. Appolicious is currently the only app engine or marketplace where developers can bid for placement in search results.

Developers can bid for placement by keyword and by broad match or exact match. It works like a simplified version of AdWords. There’s no guidance currently about bid amounts, but it’s a relative bargain at this early stage.

A considerable amount of mobile display advertising these days is devoted to promoting app downloads. Appolicious CEO Karl Stillner contends the difference between those broadly distributed mobile display ads and paid-search ads on Appolicious is that users on his site are much more targeted prospects.

Appolicious also has an expanding network of partners that include Best Buy and Samsung. Eventually the paid-search app ads will make their way to the company’s partner network.

Mobile marketing must seem that way to a lot of companies, and as a result, far too many of them are sitting on the sidelines. Fortunately, there are a few vendors out there offering a shortcut to the mobile Web:  a turnkey publishing platform that allows a marketer to quickly deploy mobile landing pages.

The question is: how effective are these pages in the context of mobile search?

The Case For Mobile Landing Pages

Turnkey landing pages are usually considered because of special circumstance:

• Budget. When most dollars get spent to support desktop sites, the remainder may not actually be enough to support a full-blown mobile effort.
• Direct response campaigns. Sometimes a media campaign concept drives the need for mobile landing pages to catch the resulting traffic. QR codes at trade show booths, mobile offers sent via text, and even plain-old PPC ads can drive the need for a quickly-built mobile site.

The systems available to deploy mobile landing pages change every month. So rather than single-out a single platform and dissect its features, let’s look at the factors you’ll want to keep in mind when evaluating and using these services.

Laying A Foundation

The first thing you’ll want to investigate is whether or not these landing pages can be read by a search engine. Here are a few features to look at closely:

• Dynamic Pages. Some turnkey systems use dynamic pages to quickly create pages that can respond to campaigns or even individual ads. Dynamic pages include lots of parameters in their URLs, and can cause problems for mobile search, just as they do in the desktop world.
• On-Page Coding. Mobile landing pages sometimes use special coding to create a seamless app-like experience. I’ve talked about JQuery Mobile in the past, and there are other frameworks such as XUI, JQTouch, not to mention plain-vanilla JavaScript. These schemes don’t get a 100% thumbs-up or thumbs-down – it depends on how they are used. The key is to ensure that your landing pages are actually composed of distinct pages, instead of a single downloadable page with a chameleon-like ability to alter its content.
• Navigation. If your turnkey site is built to catch campaign traffic, it may just be a collection of free-standing landing pages, with links to connect them to each other. If that’s the case, you won’t benefit from the SEO support these pages would lend to each other. Furthermore, without nav links, you may lose a connection back to the home page, which typically has the strongest SEO scoring.
• Flash. Flash is not usually employed on these sites (thank you Steve Jobs) so that’s one less thing to worry about.

Getting There From Here

Looking at all the points above, you might get the impression that optimizing your mobile landing pages will be an end in itself. And it partially is: you’ll be living with them for a while, so it’s worthwhile to see what sort of SEO performance can be extracted from it.

But you can also take a broader view. If the turnkey site and its campaigns are successful, it’s likely that more mobile projects will follow, including the creation of a more comprehensive “official” mobile website.

With that in mind, your turnkey site can be considered a precursor, one that can be used to lay a foundation for the construction of a future brand presence.

A bit of preparation can help to make that happen:

• Domain Name.  Try to anticipate the URL that will be used for your future mobile site. If you can start using that URL today, you’ll create a footprint that will help search engines discover your next website more quickly. Conversely, you should talk to your vendor if they suggest a URL based on *their* domain name, because you may lose access to it when you transition to your next mobile website.
• Recyclable URLs. What works at the site level also works at the page level. Choosing locations for landing pages that will echo the page locations of a future website will also help smooth the transition. Granted, it’s hard to predict what your future site will look like, but for basic pages like “About Us” or pages promoting on your bread-and-butter product lines, some predictions can be made.

Your short-term mobile landing pages (left) may not have as much content as your future mobile website (right.) But the more they resemble each other in structure, the better your mobile SEO will be down the road.

Altogether, mobile landing pages are a great tactic for getting yourself into the mobile space. And with advance planning, that short-term success can be leveraged into an asset that can feed into successive projects, creating a win-win for both mobile search and your time-to-market.

The Location Extensions allow local business advertisers on Bing and Yahoo! search results to display their addresses and phone numbers within the ads, similar to the Location Extensions in Google AdWords.

The interface for adding location extension information is pretty straightforward:

The Location Extensions are clearly part of the adCenter team’s intention to achieve feature parity with Google AdWords soon, as Eric Enge mentioned last month. One feature that differentiates Microsoft’s product a little from Google’s is the “Business icon” which only appears in association with the ads that are displayed on Yahoo!.

I spoke to the adCenter product managers (Shamit Patel, Peter Yang, Erin Zefkeles and Corinne Woodward) this week about the new features and they revealed a number of interesting details. The Location Extensions are unabashedly geared to make it easy for Google AdWords advertisers to copy ad campaigns into adCenter. Businesses such as nationwide department stores can upload up to one thousand locations at a time and associate them with an ad campaign.

I asked the team if they were concerned about whether the inclusion of additional information in the ads might detract from clickthrough interactions and reduce Microsoft’s revenues (since consumers could potentially just call phone numbers displayed and/or visit the store address in-person), and they stated that initial research indicated that would not be the case — display of the local information makes the ads appear more relevant to searchers, increasing clicks and overall engagement.

While the ads can be expected to increase calls and foot traffic to storefronts, they also increase CTR in testing. For anyone familiar with local online marketing, these findings are unsurprising and make it clear that there is likely to be some pent-up demand for location extensions for PPC ads appearing in Bing and Yahoo!.

A few other details:

• Microsoft doesn’t offer their own phone call tracking service, although advertisers are welcome to provision the ads using trackable numbers.
• Unlike Google’s Location Extensions, Microsoft doesn’t require the business listing to be drawn from Bing Business Portal. (From my perspective, this is actually a good thing, since Google’s requirement that location data be drawn from Google Places is less flexible and more restrictive.)
• Bing Business Portal profile pages can be set up as landing pages for these ads, if desired.
• Location Extensions currently will not show up on Bing/Yahoo syndicated search partner sites as of yet, but the adCenter team is evaluating other properties where the feature may appear sometime down the line.

The location extensions are a great addition for local search marketers, and will likely be advantageous for local companies to integrate as soon as possible, since they would likely result in more qualified clicks and store visits.

Shamit Patel reports that Microsoft intends to accelerate the rollout of more features, so I would expect more announcements from the adCenter team in the near future.

Currently, the ads are provided through ad fees from Google and Bing. Blekko has yet to build out their own ad network.

Rich Skrenta, Blekko founder and CEO said, “we’re still ironing out the kinks.” They are testing out the RPMs, page revenue per 1000 ad units. Skrenta said he expects the CPMs to be worth between $50 and $100 because of the targeted nature of search ads.

I have yet to see any signs of ads on the search engine but they are indeed testing it. If you find an example of an ad, please share the query and an image in the comments below.

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