Magnus Nilsson on Digital Marketing

Display Advertising is Not the New Search

Magnus Nilsson — Thu, 11 Mar 2010 11:05:18 +0000

The world of display advertising is rapidly changing. What was previously heavily dependent on skilled negotiations and personal relationships, is now reliant on faceless technical expertise.

While big branding buys are still done in a traditional fashion, standard format and text-based direct response ads are increasingly managed using self-serve platforms. These utilise algorithmic auction models that are similar to their search engine cousins. This approach has been led by the Google Content Network, but also adapted by individual sites such as Facebook and Linkedin.

It’s no secret that Google is dominating the market for paid search advertising. While the competition is playing catch-up in search, the leader of the pack is aggressively moving into display advertising through the content network and its acquired Doubleclick platform.

The similarities of display and search advertising do however end at technicalities of the underlying systems.

While search is pull, display is still all about the push; users get the display ads pushed out to them when visiting a website, instead of requesting information through well-defined search terms. I’ve previously touched on this in an article targeting PPC pro’s that are moving into display advertising via the Facebook ad platform.

The skill and knowhow developed by a seasoned planner are still key to display campaign success. The increased technicality and micromanagement (and control) to optimise performance does however require updated tools and processes.

Bing.com Information Overload TV Ad Critique

Magnus Nilsson — Wed, 10 Mar 2010 13:53:47 +0000

I just spotted the new Bing advert on TV. While it’s well executed and gets the message across, I’m not sure the search engine is delivering on its promise just yet.

The spot I saw begins with a woman asking a stranger “which tube is it for Euston station?“. The man starts to ramble random information, presumably the kind of results that you’d encounter on most search engines. It closes with:

“What has information overload done to us? Next time you search online, try Bing.com – the decision engine, from Microsoft”.

A visual follows with the text “london underground” being typed into Bing. However, it never shows you the result.

I think the advert in itself is quite fun, and relates well to the feeling of information overload, but a quick test of the scenario in practise reveals that there’s yet some tweaking required to earn those bragging rights.

My first search after seeing the advert was for “which tube for euston station?”, as this is the actual phrase in the advert, and a well-targeted search query. The resulting one-box contains the local listings for shops etc, which didn’t help me with my query. The second result was however Wikipedia which gave me the answer.

When typing in the more generic query “london underground”, it did a much better job with site links for the Transport for London website (including maps), from where I could find the answer to my original problem. While this was better than the Google results, which was lacking site links, it still required some further navigation on the TFL website.

While the specific search didn’t give me a fully satisfactory result on Bing.com, I’m so overall well-impressed by the search engine, and am positive that it will be able to eat into Google’s market share.

Bing.com UK search results for "which tube for euston station?"

Bing.com UK result for "london underground"

Google.co.uk result for "london under ground"

Is Twitter Search Ads the next Affiliate Gold Rush?

Magnus Nilsson — Thu, 04 Mar 2010 15:04:53 +0000

While little is known about the impending implementation of search adverts on Twitter Search, one thing is certain: affiliates will be there. The initial roll-out might utilise manual management of adverts and work exclusively with hand-picked agencies and brands, but in my mind it’s inevitable that there will be a self-service model similar to search engines and Facebook. Here are two compelling reasons: it reduces Twitter’s costs, and generates a massive tail of smaller advertisers.

About a year ago, Twitter Search reached almost 2.8 million unique visitors a month performing many more searches. To put things into perspective, Twitter Search overtook Google’s blog search functionality, based on unique visitors.

While you can argue that this was mostly a reflection of the poor quality of Google’s Blog Search, fact of the matter is that Twitter is where people went for social results. I haven’t got any more up to date stats, or know how the integration of tweets into Google and Bing have fared, but think it’s safe to assume that Twitter Search ads is the biggest opportunity yet for advertisers and affiliates to monetize real-time search.

Technicalities aside, the biggest question is how people will interact with the adverts. Are people searching on Twitter in the same way as they are on regular search engines? Are they in the same mindset? Quiet possibly not.

From a direct response point of view, the tough nut to crack is what type of products, services, keywords and messaging will work (if at all). And with the component of real-time, there will be a never ending data stream of new phrases to test against a campaign – exactly the kind of stuff that will entice the the entrepeneurial and analytical search marketer and affiliate.

While that’s great for conversion testing, brands and networks need to make sure that they are monitoring the implementation by affiliate partners to make sure that they don’t damage the brands. Ergo, it’s time to take a look at revising those affiliate T&C’s.

What’s your thoughts on Twitter Search ads?

High Quality Score Adverts Requires Creativity

Magnus Nilsson — Wed, 24 Feb 2010 22:25:08 +0000

For search engines and their users, relevance is key to quality and performance. However, the current implementation of Quality Score makes for some tricky challenges in creating adverts. What’s the solution? Be creative!

In addition to click-through rate, the Google quality score (and similarly Bing’s and Yahoo’s counterparts) will look at how well the ad copy is related to the search query. Thus it’s key to include at least part of the search phrase in the ad copy.

An alternative title to this post is “Why your display ads won’t translate into good search adverts”.

Two reasons for having the search phrase in the ad copy:

The keyword will get a relevance boost by default (leading to a higher quality score)
The phrase will get bolded and draw attention of users and likely an increased CTR (leading to a higher quality score)

It is however not always optimal to have unique ad copies per keyword:

It increases the complexity of the campaign, and automation tools (like your home-made excel function) can create ad copies that while keyword stuffed for relevance, reads poorly and have an adverse effect on click-through rates or branding implications
Prevents efficient split-testing of creative for low impression and click keywords as they take too long to gather enough data

So what are you to do?

Get your in-house PPC expert or Agency intimately involved in the creation of ad copies, and don’t rely on simply translating display adverts to search
Understand that while an ad copy might not always read grammatically correct, there is possibly good reason for it, as it may still perform where it counts (in search engine terms) – CTR and CR
Do not simply resort to using Dynamic Keyword Insertion. Firstly, this won’t help your quality score relevance metric, and secondly it’s very easy to get it wrong with horrendous results

What are your best PPC ad copy tips? Please share in the comments.

SES London – Affiliate Marketing Doesn’t Equal Search

Magnus Nilsson — Wed, 17 Feb 2010 21:33:14 +0000

At the second day of the Search Engine Strategies London conference, I attended the session named “New Affiliate Opportunities and Strategies”. While I have the out most respect for the people speaking and their experience and skill set, I feel that the session failed to deliver anything relevant to more than a handful of affiliate rookies and possibly even making them a massive disservice by equating affiliate to search.

Here’s the rant. To start things off, the first session covered basic SEO 101. I surely wouldn’t put this in the section of “new opportunities and strategies”. During the second session there was a recommendation for budding affiliates to look into gambling and forex trading sector. Aren’t these incredibly competitive? IMHO – if you’re not already in this niche, odds are that you’re not very competitive and likely will never make any considerable money out of this via search engine traffic (regardless of if it’s organic or pay per click).

Another suggestion for when researching a niche to select as an affiliate, was to analyse the keyword competition and consequently opportunity. I think this hit the core of the problem with the whole session – whether or not it was at SES the fact remain the same - affiliate doesn’t equal search engine marketing. Having experience as a former affiliate and having many conversations with networks and merchants, it’s quite clear that they are looking to move their current over-reliance on search affiliates in favor of new innovative channels to both spread the risk and increase the size of the pond they fish from.

A more reflective presentation was delivered by Matthew Wood of Affliates4U fame. My key takeaway was his approximation that in the UK there’s only about 500 affiliates that are actually making any decent money. And if my notes (or ears) don’t fail me, this “decent” amount was from £500 monthly (to the infinity, almost…). So in summary – IMHO – from a merchants point of view and the industry as a whole, affiliate marketing is a brilliant and growing business that is really working the long-tail (and I’m a big fan of affiliate marketing). But if you’re looking to quit your day job, odds are that you won’t.

Update from Matthew Wood (18 feb 2009, and 22 feb for typos):

“I probably was a bit unclear.. I was saying at each affiliate network… With say 10 networks around that would be about £5,000. Naturally many are earning significantly more. Of course, I dont send the payments, so its just a prediction.”

Even if the SES conference is all about search engines, which probably biased the presentations in both content and suggested tactics, I wouldn’t recommend any new affiliate to focus so much on search engines as a traffic source. I raised the question at the end of the session:

“Is there still room for fresh-faced affiliates to make a mark through search, or should they look at other opportunities, such as social, etc…”.

The response was simply that – yes – there are still niches out there and you don’t have to be an SEO guru to make it happen. I’m not sure I agree. If you’re aiming for nothing more than just a hobby site to possibly pay for a couple of pints at the pub, then go ahead and put in nights and days of hard work to earn that round of drinks. But if you’re looking to create a long-term full-time business, sorry, you’ve missed the gold rush of search engine optimisation and ppc arbitrage, and need to look at creating your own brand with a broader stream of quality traffic.

Did you attend the session? Please share your views in the comments.