CheezeDMG Blog

With Google’s adjusted trademark policy being implemented and future changes on the horizon, the IPA (Institute of Practitioners in Advertising) Search Group, of which CheezeDMG are a member of, undertook some research to determine the effect their new policy will have on brands and advertisers.

Search marketing, on Google in particular, is becoming increasingly competitive with cost per click prices rising organically as more advertisers use the channel. Therefore it was vital research to provide the agencies within the group, data on how to move forward with planning ahead with their clients budgets, and a holistic view on the impact the trademark policy change has had on the market.

The IPA discovered the following findings from the research:

A continuing trend of declining Click Through Rates (CTR) on Google in paid search advertising but increasing for Cost Per Click (CPC). A consistent set of data, from January 2008 to March 2009, submitted by 12 agencies on 47 brands shows that average Click Through Rates have declined from around 40% to around 20%, whilst average Cost Per Click has increased from 6p to 29p.

Arjo Ghosh, who at the time of the release of the research was Chairman of IPA Search, commented on the findings, “Search has and still is a very effective way of getting people who are looking for your brand to your site. The rising costs perhaps signify that we are becoming victims of our own success and that the market is just developing naturally and finding its point.” We look forward to future findings from this research project.

CheezeDMG have a similar view on this, with search marketing on Google, in particularly on brand terms, being an efficient and accountable method of driving significant levels of traffic to your site. The success of PPC marketing over the last 5 years though, has led to thriving competition and as mentioned, rising CPC costs which is what this report has confirmed further more.

So what can you do if you’re in a competitive market with an established brand? One things to consider would be to ‘Spread your wings’. Although Google will continue to be the focal point of any search marketing campaign whether it’s paid or natural, there are other platforms to achieve a cheaper presence and drive traffic. Yahoo!, Bing and Facebook to name a few, all offer value for money cost per click prices for your brand.

Most people would say that the current hot topic within search marketing revolves around the Yahoo/Microsoft deal. However, something of equal interest to search advertisers should be the new Twitter homepage in which is ‘Search’ focused. Following on from James Glick’s blog post on Twitter back in December 2008 , I can now report that the new homepage for Twitter incorporates a search tool bar allowing users to search on what people are talking about on Twitter.

New Twitter Home Page

In my opinion, over the long term, this is much more exciting than the Yahoo/Microsoft deal which at the end of the day is merely a shift in who has control over the ads displayed on search engines. Twitter Search indicates something that could really challenge the dominance of Google et al.

It has been clear for a while that Twitter is becoming something powerful within the online marketplace and eventually this will translate into a powerful tool for advertisers. What’s really interesting though is the potential Twitter has to make a dent on the search marketing world, with a bit more to go than the likes of Cuil and Wolphram Alpha, that a PR splash, have come and gone.

From a consumer’s perspective, Twitter could be very exciting. For example, if you want to fly to LA from London. The prices between BA and Virgin are pretty much the same, so you want to find out how the service and experience of each airline compare. If you search on Google, it will take you a while to find real opinions from real customers who have flown with these airlines. However, on Twitter, you instantly get real opinions, thoughts and reviews that are largely non-biased. Example results from a search on Twitter for ‘British Airways’ are below:

Being able to search for opinions, news, thoughts, reviews, ideas, and recommendations on any subject that is generated naturally by people is a powerful concept and unique to the online space. The two key challenges Twitter has is what would be the best way to get tweeters and consumers to use Twitter as a ‘Search Engine’ rather than just to tweet, and secondly the best way to monetise their search engine once they have built up query volume. The key would be not to dilute the ‘Independent opinions’ whilst bringing in the advertising revenue.

The new Twitter homepage also follows on from Twitter’s recent guide for business, Twitter 101, suggesting an attempt to refine Twitter’s offer to its users. The guide teaches brands how to communicate effectively via 140 characters, underlines best practices and offers several successful case studies from companies including Dell.

In summary, Twitter could and should bring something unique to the search marketing space. Something really to get excited about!

To find out how CheezeDMG can help with your brand’s Twitter experience, please contact tim.cook@cheezedmg.com.

AgencyDMG, the UK’s largest digital marketing specialist* today launched a revolutionary paid search product ‘Digital Brain: Search’ - a first-to-UK market paid search products search that enables marketers to understand the value of each click to improve search efficiency and ROI by at least 15%.

Combining AgencyDMG’s paid search expertise, powerful data and smart statistical modeling techniques, Digital Brain:Search draws on pre-existing, non-private data from a number of sources to help marketers understand all of the search interactions which take place in the consumers’ journey to purchase. It then statistically attributes the correct value to each interaction to better inform bid management and the development of campaigns.

This information allows DMG’s clients to target the consumer at their first interaction point with the brand, rather than the last, to drive maximum sales with the most efficient cost.

And by tracking the different paths to purchase, it also enables marketers to segment the target audience to inform not only their search engine marketing strategy, but also their wider marketing strategy, both on and offline.

In 2008, almost £2bn was spent on search in the UK, accounting for over 50% of all online ad expenditure.** Already being used by one of AgencyDMG’s major clients who has experienced significant improvement in paid search performance, and with several more clients due to start using it shortly; Digital Brain:Search will significantly increase the efficiency of search and will be a major force in driving growth in the industry.

CEO Ben Langdon comments; “Search engine marketing offers the opportunity to measure ROI and dynamically change campaign elements based upon those returns. But with campaigns often generating multiple exposures, ROI is hampered by the current “last click wins” model – and with advertisers increasingly focused on getting maximum value for their spend, this is commoditising the industry.

“Digital Brain: Search helps marketers understand the value of all the consumers’ search interactions and will provide a better return on investment for every pound of paid search budget. It also creates improved insight into customer attitudes and motivations that leads to more sales, not only now, but in the future.

“Putting the ‘last click wins’ debate to bed, Digital Brain:Search changes the face of search, will be a major force in driving its growth, and with it, AgencyDMG.”

*Kingston Smith W1, January 2009

** Internet Advertising Bureau, Fact Sheet: Online adspend - 2008

When Google Wave was released at Google’s I/O Developer’s Conference at the end of May it sparked considerable excitement. Now the novelty factor has worn off it’s time to start considering the potential of this revolutionary communication tool.

The application itself is impressive, but the use of its API in allowing the possibility to create bots/extensions is what could really pave the way for a new ’wave‘ of web applications, and even the advent of Web 3.0.

Google Wave screenshot

Google Wave is a real-time collaboration tool, where you can experience changes to a conversation, character by character, by multiple users and with added functionality through extensions. It falls into the ‘collaboration tool’ category due to the many uses it offers - from straight communications such as email and instant messaging - to installing the wave on sites like wikis, forums and blogs, creating content and encouraging interaction. So rather than having a set of emails, threads or instant messages; there will be just one ‘wave’.

A good way of describing how you would interact with these waves would be to imagine you’re sharing a word document with friends simultaneously, where you can edit an itinerary, decision or line-by-line conversation with them - in real-time. Doesn’t sound too revolutionary does it? Google has put their own spin on it though, by introducing intelligent formatting, real-time translation, and integrating external tools like Google Maps, images, and soon, developer’s own creations.  It wasn’t so much of a product launch, but rather an API launch so they could educate the developers that will be producing these extensions for when Google Wave is officially released later this year.

With these extensions, users will be able to simultaneously run a ‘wave’ on a blog/forum/site and see changes made both in the application and the external locations simultaneously. If the take up of Google Wave is as substantial as expected, the way that content is delivered to web pages will be completely changed and with potentially dramatic repercussions elsewhere.

For search marketing, with Google Wave providing updates within a conversation on external sites in real-time, the content will no longer be reflective of the last time it was indexed, thus rendering search results and even text ads irrelevant. If a destination page’s content changes, the ad will be less relevant and subsequently affect detrimentally the quality score and CPC price. Advertisers that would be susceptible to this would need to commit to increased levels of budget to ensure they maintain their positions if their quality score does fluctuate.

This would obviously affect certain websites more than others though, and for search engines to produce relevant results, they will need to continually update and index sites. To take search to the next level, you would need the results to be switching positions in real-time, as sites become more relevant than others.

For website owners, Google Wave could cause a change in the way users view their content - for example, being able to view articles, comment, take part in polls and interact, all through a Google Wave but without even visiting the site.  Google wants Wave to not only be the hub of all their products and communication, but also the hub for experiencing and contributing to content from the rest of the Internet. This could have a grave effect on display advertising, a crucial source of income to the running of many websites - and would prompt a sweeping shift of business models towards subscription models where users pay for content.

Google Wave will prompt a notable change in the way search engines index sites and produce results, simply because they will have no choice. Obviously, currently channels such as forums and wikis are changed often, but as Google Wave becomes widespread, search engines will have to think about how to adapt to these constant changes.
With Bing taking a couple of bites out of Google’s market share and Twitter indexing updates, search technology over the next year could produce something of a cold war. Google has already started making changes to its search functionality including “search options” and Google Squared, and this will escalate between Yahoo, Google and Microsoft as the full launch of Google Wave approaches later this year. Bing’s “decision engine” has woken Google up from a distinctly average innovative few years on its search front.

All of this has ramifications for companies using natural search, since to optimize their “crawlability” on Wave, sites will need updating once a day or even more.

Of course the scale of these changes is dependant upon take up, though anyone who has watched the Google I/O developer’s conference video would be surprised if Google Wave doesn’t become the next focus of online communication and collaboration and have a huge impact upon digital marketing.

Obviously there is a lot of discussion about Bing and is it any better than Google etc etc. Fair enough. But some of the articles I’ve read leap to conclusions that really don’t hold much water.

In one article (http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/06/10/bing_google_eyeballs/) we are led to believe that Bing is in fact better than Google for advertisers.

This is based on ‘research’ carried out by User Centric. They tracked the eyeball movement of users as they browsed both Google and Bing search results and found that although there was very little difference between them in terms of natural results, Bing attracted far more eyeball time when it came to the sponsored links.

User Centric’s results showed that Bing’s sponsored results on the right of the page attracted more eyeballs than Googles. 42% of the participants looked at Bings wheras 28% looked at Googles. Those that did look at them - spent pretty much the same amount of time looking at them.

All the research is carried out in User Centric’s labs using infra red technology to track eye movement across the page. So I trust the findings and it’s really interesting stuff - so I thought I’d do a bit more digging and see if I could find out some more.

So I went to the User Centric site and read their original article on the experiment where I discovered that the reasearch was carried out on just 21 people! http://www.usercentric.com/news/2009/06/08/eye-tracking-bing-vs-google-first-look

That strikes me as a very low sample of what is an enormous universe of internet surfers.

And lets face it - everyone is pretty much familiar with Google and considerably less familiar with Bing - so where do you think people are going to spend the most time looking around? At something they know already or at something they may never have seen before.

It may well turn out that Bing is indeed better for advertisers and that’s cool - but I don’t think we can be sure of that. Just yet.