It’s a bit like dog years. Every year in search marketing feels like 7 because so much changes so quickly, and 2008 has been no exception. I wanted to close off 2008 by running through some of the key UK search news of 2008.
Trademark wars
In May, Google updated its UK trademark policy to put it closer in line with the US market, effectively allowing advertisers to bid on any term (even “Google”) but still restricting the use of trademarked terms in ad creative. While the initial change brought much uproar, the subsequent impact on CPCs was limited thanks to the Quality Score rendering a lot of search ads irrelevant.
Left standing at the altar
After many “Will they? Won’t they?” moments Microsoft finally walked awayfrom an acquisition of Yahoo in May of this year. There are still rumours of further partnership opportunities between the two companies but Steve Ballmer has been very clear that an acquisition is now firmly “off the table”.
This year, both Google and Microsoft increased their support for the SEO community with improvements to webmaster central and an abundance of best practice guides and tips. One of the most topical at the time was Google’s commentary on dynamic vs. static URLs.
Quality, Quality, Quality
2008 saw a myriad of changes to Google’s quality score, including:
·The calculation of quality score became real-time and more transparency was provided on a scale of 1 to 10 and an indication of the cost of a “First Page Bid”.
·CTR was “normalized” to reflect an ads position on the page and higher relevance made a top sponsored listing more achievable -
Ring my bell
The 1st December was a momentous day for SEMPO when a delegation of members rang the bell at NASDAQ and launched this 5th annual “State of the Market” survey for search marketing.To complete the survey head over to the SEMPO website.
Will 2009 see as much change as this year? Paul Doleman will be posting his thoughts on that in the near year so be sure to look back after your Christmas break.
…well at least in Google’s eyes it does. Or more precisely Google Analytics.
It hasn’t been that long since Google acquired Urchin and so Google Analytics was born.
Well now the plethorea of pluggins available for the tool is extending beyond measuring the performance of search activity and a corporation’s web site performance. It’s reaching out into the social networks as well, with a variety of pluggins available like this Social Media Metrics Grease Monkey Plugin for Google Analytics.
Sempo UK have launched a new survey (www.semposurveys.com) aimed at establishing what effect (if any) the credit crunch has had on the search marketing industry.
Is search a more reliable channel in an economic downturn?
Has budget been re-allocated from other media?
Only you can answer these questions, and you can do so by filling out the quick survey linked below.
The make-up of the new 2008 Board of Directors is finally out! This Board’s term will officially begin on March 12, 2008 and includes:
Chris Boggs
Jessica Bowman
Massimo Burgio
Bruce Clay
Dave Fall
Duane Forrester
Sara Holoubek
Gord Hotchkiss
Ron Jones
Kevin Lee
Jeffrey Pruitt
Dana Todd
Have you ever been frustrated at survey data that you don’t think represents you?
Are you interested in finding out the changes in online spending, the split between SEO and PPC or the growth of the industry?
Then take part in SEMPO’s 4th annual State of the Market Survey, who knows, you may even win an 8Gb iPod touch for your effort.
What’s more, encourage all your clients to fill out the survey as well - the more data, the more useful the research. Hurry though, the survey ends on February 1st 2008.
What better way to kick of a new blog with a bit of controversy?!?
Last month the IAB published their first code of conductfor the UK Search industry and received mixed responsesfrom the search community.
It feels as though SEMPO should have an opinion on this but it’s more important that you, the members of the UK search community, to have a say. Do we need a code of conduct? Are their guidelines we should all be operating within or is it simply too early in the market’s development to be restraining it with regulation?
Google Campaign Optimiser – does this spell the end for Search Engine Marketing Professionals?Hardly.Although to be fair, Google aren’t claiming that their new Campaign Optimiser tool is the be all and end all of account optimisation.Their Inside AdWords announcement suggests that it’s the first step and not the last step in optimising an account.
So what does it do?
The tool claims to analyse recent performance of the campaign, and take that into account when proposing any changes to the campaign.Then the proposal comes back in the form of a wizard which guides the user through the results, which they can either accept, or ignore.The proposal usually consists of a suggested increase to the campaign daily budget if it’s reaching its cap, followed by suggestions broken down per Ad Group:
Add new keywords
Refine Match types
Adjust maximum CPC
Change Ad Text.
So is it useful?
Many of these suggestions are already available in other tools, and what Campaign Optimiser does is combine all these together and walk the user through it.
- Campaign budget suggestions have been available in the interface for several months.
- Add New keywords suggested are gathered from the keyword suggestion tool and therefore don’t take into account keywords running in other campaigns.
- Refine Match type seems to advise reviewing matching options to target interested users.If all the keywords in an Ad Group are on broad match, it doesn’t advise this.If you use exact or phrase match, it suggests adding the broad match variants in the add new keywords section.All the suggestions seem to be to affect an increase in volume.
- Adjust Maximum CPC suggestions, in all the proposals I’ve seen refer to increasing CPC in order to increase volume
- Change Ad Text proposal more often than not only seems to recommend changing the display URL to sentence case.
I can’t see it – where is it?
Unfortunately if you run your AdWords accounts via an MCC, then you won’t see the tool available.As with some other optimisation tools, Google have restricted their access via individual account logins only, so you’ll have to log out and then log back in again.The tool is also restricted to campaigns which don’t have a large number of keywords, and appears to timeout frequently probably due to high initial usage.
Should I use it?
If you’re an experienced AdWords professional, you won’t have any need to use Campaign Optimiser.Campaign daily budgets are normally used to control spend, and I think it is unlikely an experienced user wouldn’t think of checking the daily limit if they needed more volume.Likewise, the add new keywords tool is so closely integrated into the interface that it is much easier to introduce new keywords from the Ad Group than it is from this new tool.I’d be concerned about users adjusting CPC or introducing new match types from this tool without any consideration to return on investment.The changes to Ad Text, whilst interesting, don’t justify the investment in time of using the tool.
Conclusion
I think it’s fair to say that Search Engine Marketing Professionals can sleep well tonight, not having to fear that tomorrow they’re going to be replaced by yet another Google tool.As a tool, it seems to be squarely aimed at business owners running their own campaigns, and the likely result of an optimisation will be an increase in volume.As long as those business owners heed Google’s advice and use it as the first step in optimisation, and not the last, then hopefully they’ll be able to bring about a change in performance and not just volume.
As I’m sure many of you are aware Yahoo! has completed the migration of UK advertising accounts onto Panama.
Panama - what’s that? In simple terms it is Yahoo!’s new system for managing and serving Pay-Per-Click adverts.
So does it live up to the hype? Errrm, well it does have a number of new features:
account structures similar to Google,
the ability to split budgets within one account,
campaign start and end date setting,
daily spend limits,
the ability to run 20 different types of copy and optimise by click through rate,
new reporting tools,
geo-targeting,
and the ability to upload copy directly via the interface.
So what’s the verdict? Well all these features improve matters, expecially the interface upload - which is making a big impact on the FMCG market, but the biggest impact by far is the change to the bid landscape caused by the quality score introduction.
This brings Yahoo! in-line with Google and MSN and from the outside looks like it is going to be a big success, but there is one problem. When the system launched some accounts were given an unfair advantage as not everyone was migrated onto the new system before the new ranking was activated.
Why is that a problem? It’s simple really - it realtes to the way the new algorithm works - using relevancy and bid price to determine your rank. Those accounts that were live on Panama when the new ranking was activated have had the opportunity to build clicks and history, whilst those left behind have not.
Bluntly, if you were one of the last accounts to be migrated, you may have to pay more.
Is there a fix? The simplest way is to create a level playing field by Yah00! pressing the reset button and clear all account history, resetting the ranking for everyone - but will they do this?
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