George Michie is Chief Marketing Scientist of Merkle|RKG, a technology and service leader in paid search, SEO, performance display, social media, and the science of online marketing. He also writes for the RKG Blog. Follow him on Twitter at @georgemichie1.
Google may soon allow advertisers to use first-party data targeting in their search campaigns, and contributor George Michie explains why this change will benefit advertisers and customers alike.
What's the relationship between traffic and revenue in SEM? Columnist George Michie explains.
Last month, I suggested that spending beyond observed profit maximization in paid search can make a great deal of sense on a number of grounds. In a nutshell, the argument is that a combination of other factors can make “losing money” on the incremental investment rational. Here’s why: You might not actually be losing money. […]
The following post contains a number of metaphors strained to the breaking point; viewer discretion is advised. An enduring truth in the paid search business is that paid search managers and marketing teams spend far more time thinking about tactical minutia than they do thinking about what are far and away the most important questions […]
If you’re reading this, you probably already know that Google is making changes that will bring the much-maligned “(not provided)” to paid search. The AdWords world has been abuzz about the change for the past few days. The gist of the development is that when people using secure search click on AdWords ads, the user’s search […]
Sophisticated marketers think about building business from two different constituencies: new customers and repeat customers. In industry vernacular, this is often framed as customer acquisition and customer retention. And sometimes, marketing efforts are split along these lines. Paid search is a tremendous vehicle for both of these constituencies. In the case of new customers, ads […]
Smart use of the geo-targeting controls through Enhanced Campaigns in AdWords will prove to be the single largest opportunity for paid search marketers in 2014. Geo-targeting is nothing new. It has been a foundational element for local and regional businesses since the very early days of AdWords. What Enhanced Campaigns gives us is the ability […]
As we predicted a few months back, Enhanced Campaigns and mobile modifiers have been a benefit to those companies that employ them wisely. We’re excited to fold Google’s cross-device and in-store tracking into this mix as well as our own system for understanding micro-conversions. We’re also excited about the future of Enhanced Campaigns as more […]
RKG has long been interested in the question of online to offline spillover. We’ve also long been critical of the sloppy, ill-conceived tests that have misled many advertisers on this spillover in the past. We’ve recently participated with a few of our retail-chain clients on more carefully designed studies to get a more responsible answer […]
A great many folks spend time thinking about position on pages, both for their ads and for their organic listings. People care about position, but it’s really a proxy for what we should pay attention to: traffic volume and quality. Indeed, position itself as a KPI is pretty meaningless, and focusing too much attention on […]
Budgets are a fact of life for many paid search program managers. Budgets are essential for some firms, unnecessary but required nevertheless for others; and, on too many occasions, an onerous impediment to success in paid search. I’ve argued in the past that many in the e-commerce space should not budget search at all. If […]
The spectacular growth of Product Listing Ads (PLAs) over the past 2-1/2 years has been a boon for Google and advertisers as well as for consumers. This growth was spurred by the visual appeal of the ads themselves, by Google’s increasing sophistication in serving the right PLAs for the right queries and by Google’s decision […]
The shift to Enhanced Campaigns is important to every advertiser, but critically important to Enterprise programs, particularly those with meaningful brick and mortar footprints. The reality of Enhanced Campaigns today doesn’t create much urgency to switch over. We don’t get any more controls, and in fact, we lose some. However, the near-term future of EC […]
Enhanced Campaigns are the most important architectural change to Google AdWords since it moved from the right rail to take the place of “premium placements” in 2004. Much of the early commentary has focused on the version 1.0 implementation. It is important for Enterprise SEM program managers to start thinking hard and deep about the […]
The smartest way to begin 2013 might well be to make a careful review of paid search performance and practices in 2012. If your company spends closer to 8 figures than 6 on paid search annually it is well worth the time of the CMO to take a deep dive here. Evaluating an enterprise paid-search program […]
The beauty of working in the digital marketing industry is that it is difficult to get bored. There is a new advertising option available every week, it seems, a new Google algorithm update, a new targeting option, and a new rocket ship social media platform clamoring for attention. The demands on the online marketing director’s […]
Enterprise businesses demand savvy communication from SEM managers. It is the nature of large organizations to have the following: Senior executives reviewing data from programs they don’t understand A shortage of institutional memory Consultants coming and going who offer opinions based on superficial data Each of these traits make performance reporting particularly important, and sometimes […]
The time delay between marketing exposure and marketing success creates tremendous opportunity for consternation for all paid search managers, but particularly for enterprise programs. Let’s look at three ways that time can distort one’s perspective, and consider a solution that can be helpful. In most paid search reporting platforms, the default setting (often the only […]
Segmentation is the key to success in most marketing activities. Simply recognizing that how traffic gets to the site tells us a great deal about its value should prompt analysts to dive into data. Doing so often reveals big opportunities in device segmentation. Golden Tablets I’m not talking about Joseph Smith’s discovery, I’m talking about […]
Enterprise SEM practices apply not just to direct response advertisers, but to brand advertisers as well. We’ll dive into that logic after a brief stroll down memory lane. The earliest adopters of sophisticated paid search practices were those companies with deep roots in direct response marketing. In e-commerce, it was the traditional catalog companies that […]
An Enterprise Paid Search program can be, and should be, a sophisticated operation. Sophistication drives performance, but can often lead to challenges with perceived performance within the organization. It is not at all uncommon for senior management to become unhappy with a terrific and progressing paid search program because of the way we communicate results. […]
In 1927, Werner von Heisenberg documented what he referred to as an “Uncertainty Principle” governing quantum mechanics. The Uncertainty Principle holds that an observation cannot precisely reveal both the position of a particle at a point in time and its momentum. The more the observation reveals about one, the less the observer can know about […]
There are plenty of good reasons to advertise on your brand name. Advertising on your brand allows you to: Control the message. The text of the message can be kept fresh, highlighting promotions, shipping cut-off dates, whatever makes sense for the brand. Direct traffic. Site-links provide an opportunity for users to navigate to the next […]
At the most recent Search Insider Summit, Aaron Goldman moderated a terrific panel titled “The Perfect Search Engine” (video here). Panelists evaluated how the perfect search engine (“PSE”) might take information (voice, text, other signals), how it should display that information, and what factors should carry the most weight in ranking results. Overall, the discussion was […]
Should companies pay for ads on their brand name? There are plenty of good reasons to do so regardless of the ROI, but those keenly interested in ROI and vexed by the concept of paying for traffic on their trademarks still ask the question. We’ve done some research on this topic that we’ll share below. […]
As Pamela Parker described at SEL recently, Google has announced that going forward, landing page quality will be a larger factor in an ad’s overall Quality Score. Given that my last post for SEL was on Quality Score and suggested that landing page quality was mostly a hammer used to beat up bad actors and […]
Far too much has been written about Quality Score already and I’m loathe to add to the pile, but I have some ideas that might help us all. The exact recipes for Quality Score on Google and Bing are unknown, and it is that uncertainty that creates so much room for mischief and blather. Uncertainty […]
Granted, we’re geeks. We get really excited anytime the engines give us new information to analyze or tools with which we can fine-tune our approach. Google has just given us a treasure trove of new information: click level data on an ad’s position. In the past, we’ve had to rely on observations and average position […]
How should advertisers and their agencies think about cookies? Oft neglected in the discussions of ROI measurement and attribution management is the question: how long after an interaction with an ad should a marketing channel receive credit? Today, I want to pontificate a bit on the subject and then dive into some brass tacks, practical […]
In the complex world of media mix analysis, it’s important to have a trustworthy guide. Just as a last touch attribution model can lead to mis-allocation of resources, over-crediting first touches can mislead as well. All marketing/advertising impressions are not equally valuable. A thirty-second TV spot, a quality visit to your website, a walk through […]
Smart bidding is about matching bids to the value of traffic at the most granular levels: what is this click worth on this keyword, given this user search, from this geography, at this time, on this day? To do this at the highest levels, it is often necessary to pull in data beyond what is […]
Suppose you run a banana stand. You buy pallets of bananas and sell them for $1.00/banana to poor saps in the airport. You normally buy bananas from Farmer Jones for $0.30 each. You have an additional $0.60/banana in expenses for delivery costs, storage, staffing, airport booth rental, etc, leaving you with $0.10 profit on each […]
At SMX West last month, I participated in a panel discussion on Google’s new ad formats. Today, I want to share some findings, tips and tricks for getting the most out of Product Listing Ads. What Are Product Listing Ads? Google learned that folding images, videos, maps etc into organic search results — a.k.a. Universal […]
Craig Danuloff wrote a very interesting, somewhat controversial piece a few weeks back arguing that advanced bidding strategies should take a back seat to core campaign development, keywords, adgroup architecture, ad copy and landing page assignments for most advertisers. We agreed that good bidding can’t save a badly constructed program, but as Bradd Libby correctly […]
Occasionally, I’m asked by investment bank types whether Google can “dial up” their revenue on a whim, and moreover whether they do so. The short answer is “certainly, yes” to the first part, and “probably no” to the second. It’s worth spending a bit of time to detail Google’s three major revenue dials. {Note: Most […]
Wouldn’t it be great if you could measure the success of your paid search program by comparing your numbers against industry benchmarks? Every advertiser would love to know how their program stacks up against the competition in terms of: The breadth of keyword coverage The quality of the landing pages chosen The effectiveness of the […]
An often debated question in our industry is “Which is more important: the bid management tools used or the person who does the managing?” Sometimes the argument becomes self-serving, with artisans who manage their programs manually saying it’s all about the person, and tool providers arguing that it’s all about the algorithms, analytic power and […]
Drawing lines in the sand and enforcing them is harder than it may appear. Perhaps these "rules of engagement" will help.
Search advertising has resembled the wild west for too long. Advertisers have been misled, mistreated and overcharged; the standards of service must improve lest all firms—good, bad and indifferent—be tarred with the same brush. Herewith, a modest proposal for a bill of rights for advertisers.
Google Instant rolled out September 8th to much fanfare and ballyhoo. The search marketing industry has been abuzz ever since with speculation about the impacts on both paid and natural search. Our firm has taken a pretty close look at the initial impact on paid search performance and we want to share our findings with […]