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More on View-Through Conversions

Monday, August 16th, 2010

Have we mentioned how much we love being able to accurately report view-through conversions?

View-through conversions allow you to get a better understanding of the effectiveness of your display advertising. If a user sees your display ad on the content network and doesn’t click on it, but completes a conversion within the next 30 days, voila, you get a view-through conversion.

If the user had clicked on the display ad, it would be reported as a regular conversion.

Remember: When you are running display ads ALWAYS enable de-duplication. This way you’ll avoid double reporting if a user sees your display ad on a site, and converts from another ad in the search results. Then there’s no need to worry!

Another thing to note is that your conversions will drop after enabling the de-dupe feature, generally by 25-35%, but simply because they aren’t being double counted or inflated.

Tags: content network, conversions, display advertising, reporting, SEM
Posted in Google, SEM | 2 Comments »

New Google Image Search

Thursday, July 22nd, 2010

Google is rolling out a new layout for image search, and it’s nicely improved. About 7%+ of all searches are for images, and while people are willing to go deeper (considering more results before making a choice), the top results are going to be chosen much more frequently. It’s much more user friendly: with long scrolling pages filled with images and tons of options to narrow your search. I like the mouse-over the best, where it expands the image, with the originating website, size, and format.

And importantly it has sponsored links. So for home improvement, fashion and hair cuts, photography and portraits, how-to and other very popular types of searches, this can be a fantastic new avenue for advertisers.

What’s a marketer to do to take advantage of this?

Advertise
Always name your image appropriately so it can be categorized accurately
Determine important searches that could relate to your products and services
Make multiple sizes
Make multiple colors
Line drawings? Clip art?
Include a watermark or product name
Photograph your product being used

Posted in Google, images | No Comments »

New Google Analyze Competition Feature

Tuesday, July 13th, 2010

Recently Google AdWords released another feature to give you insight into your account’s performance. Its goal: to show you how some of your performance metrics compare to other advertisers Google has determined offer the same goods or services as you.

Per Google:

‘Analyze competition’ examines your account’s activity over the past two weeks and lists categories that represent the products or services you’re advertising. Categories are based on actual Google.com search terms and are matched up against your keywords, ad text, and landing page text. For each category associated with your account, you’ll see a bar graph, which shows your individual performance compared to the average performance of other advertisers in the same category.

What it means to you? We think it has great future potential, if it includes more insight into what might help you move up the chain. Useful questions it could help you answer in the future:

Have you forgotten major keywords?
Are you not bidding enough?
What about the Quality Scores of the competition?
Is the competition getting more or less business than you as a result of their PPC advertising?

CTR is a pet metric of ours, but beating your competitors’ CTR doesn’t necessarily have much impact on your bottom line. We say it’s business as usual, though high marks in the Analyze Competition feature may give you some nice bragging rights. For now, it’s a nice way to do a reality check on your impressions, clicks, CTR and Avg. Position (the four metrics available in the report).

Posted in Analytics, Google | No Comments »

What Happened to the Google AdWords “Previous Interface” option?

Tuesday, June 22nd, 2010

When Google came out for a visit last month we got hints that they might be ready to kill the "previous interface" option for finding new keywords in Google AdWords. And today (tonight we think) it seems that they did finally. There is a hint of a new backend that might be better called "nostradamo" that is linked from the new keyword interface, but it’s broken right now.

Why I liked the old version better.

I was used to it. (lame I know, but still)
Less broad. Now I enter a keyword and I get a huge amount of synonyms and I have to go in and uncheck the categories.
Automatic. Hear me out here. So in the old version if you didn’t add anything into the box if would automatically give suggestions on anything that was in your ad group already. SO you could enter some placeholders in Google AdWords Editor, post them, then look for suggestions. Seems like not a big deal, but it saved time, and it felt like a lot of time. If the new interface had this one option, I think I would like it more.
This is a big one: "Don’t show me suggestions for other keywords." This allowed you to quickly get estimated monthly searches for your previously chosen keywords. So we would settle on a set of keywords to recommend to clients, and would then want to go get number of search estimates.

There are some things I do like: The ability to drop different keywords into different ad groups. That’s nice.

And of course this comes at a bad time. There are three of us tonight working on deadlines, and we’re all sending sad and frustrated IM’s back and forth about it. You can still access the open version that isn’t tied to your account. But that means that you can’t save them into the ad group. Also the keyword tool in Editor is still working, but that works only 1 keyword at a time.

So my plea to Google: PLEASE bring back the previous interface.

Please leave comments (legitimate – we’ll ruthlessly delete spam.)

Tags: AdWords, Google, keyword tool
Posted in Google, PPC, SEM, SEO | 2 Comments »

New Google View-Through Conversion Reporting

Thursday, May 27th, 2010

We had one of those problems that most SEM agencies dream of having. We have clients who are running display ads on the Google Content Network whose view through conversions are in the hundreds a month. We love to report on this number, but have to add the caveat that a certain % of those conversions are actually counted elsewhere in their other search campaigns. Faces turn from happy to puzzled in a manner of seconds.

So when our Google reps were in town visiting us last week, we mentioned this problem. They looked over their shoulders to see if anybody was watching before saying, in a whisper: "This doesn’t leave this room, but we are looking into a feature that de-duplicates view-through conversions."

And sure enough, the next week we ran across this blog post on Google that talks about this exact feature.

Many of you know that view-through conversions result when users see but don’t click on a display ad. They may come back later and convert through a search ad, which would count the conversion twice. Which makes reporting nearly impossible and leads to puzzled faces.

By enabling the de-duplication feature, you exclude view-through conversions that are found in both the Search and Content networks!

Do note that the feature isn’t retroactive, and that going forward, the number of view-through conversions will drop. In the first few days of testing, we saw a 35% decrease in the number of reported view-through conversions. But what we are left with is basically 65% more conversions that we can accurately report back to our clients.

We can’t wait to see their faces.

Tags: conversions, google analytics, reporting, SEM
Posted in Analytics, Google, PPC, SEM | No Comments »

Je ne suis pas un robot!

Friday, April 30th, 2010

Kind of fun. This computer has probably queried Google at least 1000 times today… keep getting prompted to prove I’m a human visitor. Checking for saturation of .EU top level domains in France only searches on Google.FR and just got this form. Finally found a use for all those French classes.

Tags: European Union, France
Posted in Google, SEO | No Comments »

“What is tuna made of?” and other weird searches on Google

Monday, April 19th, 2010

The goal of search engines such as Google is to serve up relevant results for any given query, regardless of merit. As a search engine marketing firm, we get exposed to a lot of real doozies that makes us think, “how is this relevant?” “who are these people that searched on this?” or just “WTF?!”

Below the staff of Nina Hale Inc has gathered some of the funniest or weirdest search queries that we stumbled across while working on client accounts.

These are real searches that people conducted on Google from Jan – March, 2010.

gloves that people can shoot out web
wool gangster shirts
what were the boots worn by tom selleck in quigley down under
do tuna cook while they swim
who invented friction
kitten smells like rotten eggs
is turkey poop brown
what is tuna made of
what does Farrah Faucet look like
did duck hunting change the world

Runners Up – or "You had me at 86 young!"

golf cart dui
bare thighs squeezes
birth certificate for republic of guinea
there he goes one of gods own prototypes
free left-handed scholarships
penile fitness
can you wear wool in the rain
86 year young lady leaky heart valve surgery swollen feet ankles
what kind of boots does bruce springsteen wear
what are small flat bottom boats such as duck hunting boats prone to do
preppy dog collars for boys
I can’t feel my fingers

Thanks to Tami Esslinger on the NHI staff for compiling these from the staff.
Come back every few months for more weird or funny searches we’ve seen.

Posted in Google, Random Search Fun | 1 Comment »

Google Indexing “Freaky Fast”

Tuesday, April 13th, 2010

The popular sandwich shop near my house has been freaky slow lately– half-hour waits and the drivers seem to get lost even though I live on the same street and only three blocks away. Go figure.

Google, on the other hand, is insanely fast– picking up new sites and ranking them in as little as 10 hours. We helped a web developer launch a new client site yesterday on a brand new, just registered domain at 4:30PM CDT. We added the domain to the usual Google, Yahoo! and Bing URL submission forms, set up Google Webmasters Tools with a sitemap XML feed. This morning when we got to work– there was the site, ranking in Google number one for their brand. A quick check of the Google Webmasters Site Crawl report indeed confirmed it: Googlebot visited and indexed one page.

Yahoo! was just as fast if not faster as they’ve indexed a total of three pages from the new site over night, BUT they missed the homepage and rank the "privacy policy" page at number two for the brand– not ideal.

So far, nothing on Bing.

Tags: bing, Google, Search engine optimization, Site map, yahoo
Posted in Google, SEO | No Comments »

Google Favorite Places

Monday, April 12th, 2010

Google continues to send QR bar-coded window stickers to U.S. businesses who are already signed up in the local business center, and meet other requirements such as number of searches for directions and other information.

Once the business is registered, they can add coupons, images, videos, descriptions, links, hours and more. Customers with smart phones then scan the sticker (try the one above to get to Nina Hale, Inc), read or write reviews, view the coupons or mark it as a favorite place to visit later.

This is a great way for small businesses to interact with their customers, and is a smart way to bring more people into the Google advertising funnel.

At this point there is no way to request inclusion in this Google Beta, but you can join the action by getting your own QR (quick response) code here and put it on your blog, site, or email.

Posted in Google, Google Local Business Center | No Comments »

Google Local Beta Brings Sponsored Results to Maps

Wednesday, April 7th, 2010

Just when you thought you had gotten used to recent changes at Google Local Business Center & maps, they throw a little bomb at you.

What you see below is an example of this bomb—a sponsored site creeping into what was formerly a space reserved for organic map results only.

Their intentions are clear—to draw in the $29 billion pool of small businesses that may feel overwhelmed and overbid in today’s online landscape by offering a $25/month enhanced listing that shows up with organic search results. People with a local business account can choose and alternate between seven ways to promote their enhanced listing: photos, videos, link to site, coupons, directions, menu and reservations.

The problem has always been how to tap into such a wide base of small businesses that historically doesn’t spend much money in online advertising while making it profitable. A problem companies like Dex and Yellow Pages continue to struggle with.

Google began cracking this shell last year by offering a way to measure the results of the Local Business Center, making it really easy for small businesses to see how many people are getting directions to their store, printing a coupon, or clicking through.

Right now this is only available in Houston and San Jose, but expect that this will grow as Google continues on its quest: “To organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.

Click here to read the original New York Times article.

Tags: google natural search results, nina hale inc
Posted in Google, Google Local Business Center | No Comments »