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Archive for the ‘PPC’ Category

Facebook Ads – Broad Category Targeting

Thursday, June 9th, 2011

Facebook has been rolling out new targeting options for its ads. In the past Facebook Ads were “push” model. You had to specify a keyword interest if you wanted to go beyond simple demographics. If the database (which wasn’t always complete) had people who had identified themselves as having those interests, it would show up as an option that you could choose. So in order to target Moms, we would have to list every possible thing we thought moms might be interested in. Now in this new model, you can precisely target Moms, even down to the age of their children.

There are a lot of options so far, including mobile interests (or is it platforms? I don’t know, but I’ll find out soon).

As in the past you can overlay these with demographics. So only single women of a certain age, in the US (you could choose a specific location), who are parents of teenagers.

What’s still missing? People CONNECTED to people who fit these demographics. This is important for advertisers, because come holiday, I may want to show ads for fishing lurea to people who are married to avid fishermen, for example.

You still can’t overlay elements within categories. This makes it hard to find people with specific interests – see my example below

But you can hone by adding targets, and these do overlay on each other

Location (Minnesota)
Demogtraphics (women)
Age Range (or specific)
Connections (if you’re an admin of a page, you can show ads to fans, or to everyone BUT fans, or to friends of fans, etc)
Interests (specific keywords – old skool) or new categories
Advanced demographics (single)
Education (high school grad)

What do I see in our immediate future? FATHER’S DAY! (target ads to married women with kids)

Posted in PPC, SEM, Social Media | 1 Comment »

How to Add Self-Serve Placement Ads on YouTube

Saturday, September 18th, 2010

Are you going crazy trying to find out where to login and add YouTube videos to your media plan? Have you gone crazy trying to find it when maybe you even used it before and why in the world is it so hard to find? (not that I’m talking from experience, it must have just been the fever that kept me home for the past two days.) Your search is over, here is where to find videos on YouTube to place your ads on: http://www.google.com/videotargeting/aw/addPlacements?pli=1

When you login to YouTube to use it’s placement tool, you can get more specific and in-depth with choosing specific users, channels, and videos to show ads on. Their Video Placement Tool. Once you’ve created this media plan, then you connect it with your Google AdWords account and the ad placements import in. One problem through that is also frustrating is that I can’t figure out how to select some as specific negatives prior to launch – the interface won’t let me, AdWords Editor won’t let me. I’m creating one for a client (The Pillar Procedure) who has a procedure to stop snoring and I can’t believe how many people post videos of thier dogs snoring. The benefit of doing this is YouTube is that rather than targeting just by keyword or channel which are your options from Google AdWords, within YouTube you can drill down to specific videos. Another dog related example. I’m running ads for a client (Irish Setter) for their new rubber hunting boots, and wanted to target videos of hunting and deer hunters, but lots of people post tribute videos of pets killed by hunters, or post videos of deer in their back yard, which isn’t the audience I want even if those videos might be in the Hunting and Shooting category.

What is exciting is that with the inline ads that show at the bottom of the video for about 30 seconds, we’re getting great clickthrough and conversion rates even though they interrupt the video. We always pair them with a compainion square banner ad in the upper corner because I figure “why would I click on the ad, I’m here to watch the video” but after it’s over, the banner is there to click to the site.

And then you may say “but Nina, is this search engine marketing?” to which we say “well, YouTube is the second largest search engine.” And also more importantly, the new targeting features that search engines are creating for their advertising networks takes SEM into a new realm of Paid Placement: highly targeted pay-for-performance advertising based on keyword and shown interests. Booya! (I am feeling all this hunting testosterone).

1. Create a shell adgroup in Google AdWords (you can do this in YouTube but if you do the shell first you can have it paused on creation – if you create it while importing you’ll have to go back into AdWords to pause it.)
2. Start with creating a new YouTube account based on that client’s main login to AdWords.
3. Choose your placements on YouTube
4. Sync them to the shell adgroup in your Google AdWords account
5. Launch and optimize

Posted in Google, PPC, YouTube | No Comments »

“Official site” tag in Yahoo Search Marketing

Thursday, August 19th, 2010

I’m not going to be all that sad when Yahoo Search Marketing goes away, mainly because the interface is such a pain to use. But they have a great feature which is fantastic for big brands that get poached on thier trademarks all the time.

A small logo on the search ads that says “official site.” Hello! I wish Google Adwords would have this.

Posted in PPC, SEM | 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 | 3 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 »

AdWords Click Attribution: New PPC Reports Shed Light on Conversion Attribution

Wednesday, March 31st, 2010

It has always been tough to get the full picture of what drives potential customers to visit a website. Even with expensive and complex web analytics packages, conversion and click attribution has been difficult. Recently, Google has taken a step toward providing AdWords users more in depth information regarding the impression and click behavior leading up to a conversion.

Within the next several weeks, Google will be rolling out what they call the Search Funnel Reports (beta). In the past, this information was only available to SEM agencies, like Nina Hale Inc, by request from their Google reps. This will allow AdWords users to see which ads and keywords assisted in bringing in conversions. The premise behind these new reports, is that people generally start their search with broad, non-branded queries, and often end with product specific branded queries. So even though the final conversion is only attributed to the last click (the last ad that was clicked on), there were likely other keywords, higher up in the search funnel, which assisted in the conversion.

There are two types of reports that are included in this Search Funnel beta – click-assisted conversions and impression-assisted conversions. Here is a brief explanation, of the information that each provides:

Click-assisted conversions: someone types in search query A “red shoes”, clicks on the corresponding AdWords ad from Shoe Warehouse, but does not convert. Later, this same person types in search query B “Shoe Warehouse”, clicks through the corresponding AdWords ad and converts. In this situation, the conversion will be attributed to the branded keyword associated with search query B, however, the new report will show a click-assisted conversion for search query A too.
Impression-assisted conversions: someone types in search query A “red shoes”, the corresponding AdWords ad is served, the person presumably sees it but does not click through. Later, this same person types in search query B “Shoe Warehouse”, clicks through the corresponding AdWords ad and converts. Like in the previous situation, the conversion will be attributed to search query B, but the new report will also show an impression-assisted conversion for search query A.

At Nina Hale, Inc. we have used this information to shed more light on the performance of non-branded campaigns for several of our ecommerce clients. Generally marketers assume branded keywords convert much better than non-branded keywords, but this new information demonstrates we can’t take conversion data at face value. There is much more going on in the search process – the broader non-branded terms are assisting the specific branded terms to convert.

Source: http://adwordsagency.blogspot.com/2010/03/new-analytics-reports-adwords-search.html

Tags: AdWords, Google, Internet marketing, search funnel, Technology/Internet
Posted in Analytics, Google, PPC | No Comments »

Omniture & Facebook

Tuesday, March 9th, 2010

At Nina Hale Inc, many of our clients use social media ads, particularly Facebook, to reach their target audience and connect with social media users. The reporting currently available through Facebook leaves a lot to be desired. We’ve searched high and low for opportunities to improve reporting for our clients and provide more actionable data to help increase this engagement in this channel.

Now for our Omniture clients there is good news!

In May 2009, Omniture announced an exciting partnership with Facebook. Just last week they announced that they are expanding on that partnership with Facebook (and apps) to include analytics capabilities. The SearchCenter Plus product, available to SiteCatalyst customers, will initially focus on automating the media buying process and access to analytics that measure consumer engagement on Facebook. The idea is to make it even easier for clients to purchase ad space as well as compare metrics alongside their other media channels with a tool they are familiar with using.

Some of the key features of the partnership will give clients the ability to:

Gain deeper insights into user behavior throughout Facebook apps—Improve the overall user experience and conversion
Understand how apps “go viral” amongst Facebook users
Segment users by number of friends and categorize these segments by social activity performed to better understand adoption rate
Correlate Facebook reports and key events with other online channel reports such as Web, mobile, video, etc.
Tools to understand how these channels are impacting conversion
Measure 100% of Facebook apps including: FBML, iFrame and Flash-based apps

This tool will streamline the ad buying process and reporting for SiteCatalyst customers and may make it much easier for hesitant marketers to make the leap in allocating budget to the wildly popular social networking site.

While we know not all of our clients are using Omniture now, we see this as a great step forward and hope that Google Analytics follows suit.

Google, are you listening?

Sources:
Washington Post
Omniture.com

Tags: Facebook, Web analytics
Posted in Analytics, PPC, Social Media | No Comments »

Great Results for Our Clients!

Wednesday, February 10th, 2010

Wow, how fabulous is this screen shot of a bunch of our clients Google Analytics accounts? Almost everyone is way up, and a lot of those are from Search – both organic and paid. Everyone’s been working hard for our clients and it shows!

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Posted in Analytics, PPC, SEM, SEO | 1 Comment »

More to Love with Google AdWords Editor

Sunday, November 29th, 2009

I have have to drop in a comment about how much I love the Google AdWords Editor for PPC management. The reason is because they are always adding small improvements that display a constant awareness of how SEM campaigns are built, managed and optimized. Case in point: to optimize well, it’s a good idea to run search query reports that show you the keywords that people actually used that resulted in a click to the site (and hence a charge). These often reveal irrelevant keywords so you need to add them to a "negative" list to filter them out of the keywords you pay for your ads to show on. Any-who, when adding these new keywords, you have to add them to each campaign. Sometimes you want to add them indiviudally to campaigns or adgroups, but sometimes they apply to the whole account. In the past I would copy and paste to each campaign. But a small enhancement makes it easier to add across campaigns.

AdWords Editor is filled with all these small considerations, some of which make it much easier, and others you just save a few minutes. But it shows a remarkable attention to all those little things that make optimization easier. Now after my little love note, do you think they’ll wear my letter jacket?

Posted in Google, PPC, SEM | No Comments »