And that was search marketing in 2008….

Ξ December 24th, 2008 | → 2 Comments | ∇ Search Engines, News, SEO, SEMPO, Yahoo, Industry, Google, Microsoft, Paid Search |

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 away  from 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”.

Any bets? 

Hot on the heels of a disappointing Q3 earnings call, Google relaxed its UK restrictions on gambling ads with such short notice that many gambling companies were forced to simply re-allocate budgets from Yahoo and Microsoft Adcenter in the short-term. In 2009 it’s been predicted that this could grow to be one of the largest categories for search advertising.

More support for SEOers

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:

·         Factors influencing the quality score were increased to include the load time of landing pages.

·         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 1^st 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.

 

Merry Xmas from SEMPO UK

 

 

 

Google campaign optimiser

Ξ August 1st, 2007 | → 2 Comments | ∇ Google, Paid Search |

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.