YouTube Ads

I finally saw my first YouTube ad today. These have been around for a while, but I hadn't seen the popover type yet, until today.

It's for Biggby Coffee, a local franchise started by a Michigan State grad. Great guy. And I love their lattes. But I digress. Here's a screen shot of the ad:



And yes, I admit it - I was watching a godawful Charlie the Unicorn video. My 12-year-old twins love these things. I think the guys who make these are, well, smoking something. But again, I digress. (And I swear, this was work-related research. Really.)

This ad is clearly geo-targeted to Michigan, and possibly behaviorally-targeted as well, since I am an avowed Biggby customer and have visited their site before. Still, this is kind of cool. I'm not sure what the ROI on these ads would be, but it got my attention.

Anybody used YouTube ads like this? If so, what were your results? Would you do it again?

More Google Trademark Insanity

This has to be one of the nuttiest things I've ever seen. Via Marketing Pilgrim, it appears that a firm called Ascentive is suing Google for not showing them in the organic results. They claim that "consumers expect to see the trademark owner in organic search results for the trademark and therefore consumers will be actionably confused if the trademark owner doesn't appear there." Apparently Ascentive claims that this is a violation of a legal statute called the Lanham Act.

Are they kidding?!? Since when does a search engine have a legal obligation to list your website in their free organic results? And since when does the absence of said listing lead to consumer confusion?

I agree there is plenty of consumer confusion when it comes to the SERPs. But that has nothing to do with obligation on Google's part.

What about your obligation as a website owner to make sure your site is optimized? Hmm....

Additional coverage is at TechDirt, where I agree with the first commenter who says, "Google is not a RIGHT. They OFFER a service, they are not OBLIGATED to include you in it." Indeed.

Early Results from Bing PPC

The SEM world is still a-buzz over Bing, Microsoft's new search engine. While it's still way too early to tell whether it will be a Google killer or even an improvement over Live.com, early results for one of our adCenter PPC clients are encouraging.

I ran a quick analysis of visitors & conversions for this client, whose business is in the travel vertical, comparing the first 11 days of May to the first 11 days of June. Their PPC campaigns were unchanged during this time as far as budget and strategy.

Growth in visitors from Bing PPC is 25% higher than average. Even more exciting is that Bing/MSN's traditionally-good conversion rate is continuing: conversion rate from adCenter is 58% higher than average for PPC, and actually increased since the Bing lauch - whereas overall conversion rate from PPC is down slightly.

Is this proof that Bing's a Google killer? No. Is it a good sign for overall client ROI? Absolutely.

Microsoft Search Summit 2009: Bing, adCenter, and More

Last Wednesday through Friday, Microsoft held their Search Summit, where approximately 80 search experts gathered in Bellevue, WA to hear about and discuss the latest and greatest about Microsoft's search products. In previous years, MS had two separate conferences, with organic / SEO represented at Search Champs and advertisers at Ad Champs. This year, they decided to combine the two for a super-power-search experience.

Of course the biggest buzz out of this conference was over Bing, MS's new search engine. I have to say, initially I'm impressed with the functionality of the engine, especially in certain verticals like travel and shopping. Instead of a mish-mash of results, Bing returns an organized SERP with sections for reviews, price, features, etc. It's pretty cool.

On the advertising side, a lot of discussion focused on the adCenter spring upgrade, including the new and improved adCenter Desktop, which is close to coming out of beta.

Most of the advertiser sessions included plenty of time for questions & discussion, which is always the best part. Controversy over trademark protection continues, with lots of debate over Google's recently announced trademark policy change. It seemed as though half the attendees favored the new policy, and half were up in arms over it. I guess we'll see how it all shakes out.

All in all it was a useful and informative conference, with networking that was second to none. I'm honored to have been a part of it. I hope that Bing gives MS the traffic boost it needs to make all their efforts worthwhile.

If you're interested in reading more news from the conference, WebProNews has a good summary of interesting tweets from those in attendance.

Funny AdSense Ad Of The Day

I was reading my Gmail today when this short and sweet ad caught my eye:



I was intrigued by the ad copy, but even more so by the display URL: phoqueue.com. Say it out loud. ORK ORK!

I should send this to Bob & Tom.

Google Revises Adwords Trademark Policy

Well hallelujah and the saints be praised - Google has finally come to their senses and modified their Adwords trademark policy to allow the use of trademarked terms in ad copy. It's about flippin' time!

I've written about this a couple times, most recently just over a month ago. This trademark thing has bordered on the ridiculous many times, as anecdotes about people not being able to use the words "target" or "daddy" or "next" or other common terms abounded on forums, blogs, and Twitter. Now all that silliness has been laid to rest. From the Inside Adwords blog post:

Imagine opening your Sunday paper and seeing ads from a large supermarket chain that didn't list actual products for sale; instead, they simply listed the categories of products available - offers like "Buy discount cola" and "Snacks on sale." The ads wouldn't be useful since you wouldn't know what products are actually being offered. For many categories of advertisers, this is the problem they have faced on Google for some time.

Hey, that sounds familiar. In my post Trademark Trials and Tribulations, I wrote (emphasis added):

What I don't understand is why this is such a big deal in the search space. I mean, can you imagine JCPenney running a newspaper ad for Levi's or Carter's or Samsonite or any of the hundreds of other brands they carry in their stores - without using those names in the ad?? How silly would that look? And how many people would be compelled to shop for "great brand name jeans" or "cute brand baby clothes" or "super durable luggage" after seeing such an ad? Where would all the grocery store circulars be without using brand names and logos? What about TV ads for just about anything? What about magazine ads??

I won't go after Google for paraphrasing me. I'm just glad they've finally seen the light and modified their policy - it's long overdue.

Google Conversion Optimizer Observations

Back at SES Chicago in December, I heard a lot of good things about Google's Conversion Optimizer, which (in a nutshell) allows you to set a desired cost per action instead of cost per click on your PPC campaigns. You only pay for conversions (not clicks), and theoretically, Google's algorithm adjusts your ad serving in order to show the ad at times when it's most likely to convert. Sounds great, right? Why aren't we all using it, then?

Well, I tried it a few months ago on a client campaign that wasn't converting as well as I thought it could. To me, this is the ideal campaign for Optimizer. However, it totally bombed. Campaign trafffic dropped to next to nothing, and we got 0 conversions - that's right, 0 - in over a week of testing. I canceled the test and decided Optimizer was flawed.

But I've been mulling it over in my head ever since. That particular client had a limited PPC budget which was well below the available search volume on their keywords. And the recommended cost per conversion that Optimizer suggested was about double what their daily budget was! I had to set the cost/conversion at their daily budget limit, which severely limited Google's ability to generate conversions & traffic. I suspected this was the fly in the ointment.

So, last week I decided to try again with a different client. This client has been doing PPC for years, and they get very high conversions (both volume-wise and conversion %-wise) because their goal is lead generation (email signup). But there was one campaign that I thought could do better. So I decided to try Optimizer again.

It's only been a week, so the jury is still out, but early results are promising. Here are some early observations:

• The campaign is getting higher impressions, clicks, and CTR with Optimizer.
• Average ad position is slightly higher (but only very slightly).
• Conversion rate is 10% worse with Optimizer, and cost per conversion is 22% higher.

I know, you're thinking "Cost per conversion is 22% higher? Stop the test!" That's what I thought, too. But there's a caveat. The client drastically reduced their budget for this campaign earlier this week (a planned reduction). The lower budget has been in effect for 2 full days. (Yes, I know my test is now skewed. Keep reading...) Observations over those 2 days:

• At the lower budget level, CTR and conversion rate are nearly double what they were at the higher budget level.
• Cost per conversion is about half what it was at the higher budget.

Of course it's too early to draw any real conclusions, but what I suspect is going on is that now that the budget is lower, Optimizer is forcing ad serving on only the best-quality searches. Impression volume is about 1/6 of what it was before, but I don't care about that. I care about conversions.

Conclusions?

• Optimizer seems to work best for campaigns with lots of conversions (i.e. way above the 30 per month minimum required to use Optimizer) and a decent conversion rate (i.e. 10% or better).
• If your budget is enough to max out impressions & clicks, you may not get as favorable a cost/conversion with Optimizer as you do with a more limited budget. However...
  
• If your budget is too restrictive (i.e. impression share less than 50%) and your conversion rate is low, Optimizer is unlikely to work well for you.

I'll be running the test for another week or so to see if these observations hold true. I'd love to hear other observations about Optimizer - post them in the comments!