Search Marketing Strategies

Broad Match Modifier Available in US

Google just launched Broad Match Modifier to the rest of the world, after its initial rollout in Canada and the UK. In this short video, learn what BMM is, how to use it, and what kind of results to expect.

Adwords Feature Alert- Seller Rating Extensions

Yesterday, Google announced a new feature they are calling ‘Seller Rating Extensions.’  The Seller Rating Extension feature will automatically attach your star rating from Google Product Search if you 
currently have 4 or more stars.  The Adwords blog said that this change will be rolling out across the SERPs over the next 24 hours, so you may not see the extension on all queries.  Also, from some initial testing, it's not completely clear what extensions win out if multiple extensions could be served (Product vs. Map vs. Seller Ratings,etc).  

With this feature being rolled out with no notice and across all SERPs, their testing must have shown that this feature drives a tangible increase in CTR.  So- to take advantage, I highly recommend either A)signing up for Google Product Search if you are not already there and B)make sure you have a strong feedback score.

Is Amazon Google's biggest threat?

Read about it at sister blog Amazon Strategies.

It's Official- Bing & Yahoo are Partners!

Microsoft and Yahoo! have just received regulatory clearance to join forces in creating more balance in the search engine space.

As previously announced on this blog in July 2009, the partnership is positioned so that MSN/Bing will control the technology side - driving paid and algorithmic results for both platforms - and Yahoo! will maintain the majority of the sales and service relationships.

The self-proclaimed Search Alliance could really shape up as an interesting battle.  Since its inception, Bing has become the fastest growing search engine (mostly at the expense of Yahoo and AOL), and industry leaders have always felt that Yahoo's estimated 2.5 billion US searches per month could be better monetized with superior technology.

The announcement from Bing said the integration goal for the US is "prior to the crucial holiday season" with a staggered schedule for other countries in 2011.  Here's hoping that they pull off this widescale integration with no hiccups, as a large snafu in the middle of the busy holiday season could be painful for retailers.

The Bing announcement also mentioned that it is "business as usual now" and there is no change to your account or service.  However, we recommend doing the following to make sure that your campaigns are prepared when integration is complete:

1. Open an adCenter Account

Some advertisers spend 100% of their time and budget on Google.  If you are one of these advertisers, open up a Bing account today!  MSN usually offers up discounts for new advertisers, so we recommend you try to dig up a promo code.

2. Mirror Campaigns

Launch your whole Google account on Bing!  Many advertisers launch on Google, planning to launch campaigns on Yahoo! and Bing later, but never do.  Make sure that you push all of the work you have done on Google over to Bing to ensure that you have equal coverage on both engines. 

3. Stay Abreast of Developments

When the integration is complete (late 2010), make sure you understand exactly how the two platforms are going to appear in adCenter. Our data shows that Bing has a much better ROI than Yahoo, so you should make every effort to manage these two properties separately. Similar to the Search Network/Content Network for Google Adwords, make sure that you keep these two different types of campaigns separate if possible.

Check out a quick video clip about the Search Alliance:

Search Alliance Video

Free Webinar tomorrow, 11/10/09 - e-commerce gut check - with tasty search tidbits!

Tomorrow ChannelAdvisor is hosting a webinar tomorrow where we'll go over the Q3 results for various companies (eBay, Amazon, Google, etc.) as well as look at the various Q4 forecasts and reveal ChannelAdvisor's October data.

We'll wrap with 10 last-minute strategies that you can implement BEFORE BLACK FRIDAY / CYBERMONDAY and get that last little bit of juice out of your holiday sales.

For you Searchmarketing readers, we'll have some specific search strategies that can amp up your holiday sales, so be sure to tune in.

I hope you are able to make it, registration is open here:  and if you aren't able to make it, the recording will be available on the same page about 24hrs after the webinar in the 'Webinar Library' section.  The webinar is at 2pm EDT.

The Effects of Keyword Insertion on Ad Performance

Keyword insertion can be a powerful tool in pay per click campaigns, and its ability to increase click through rate is well documented, but how does it affect conversion rate? Recently, one of my clients wanted to run a test to see just what this effect would be. To conduct this test, we took a subset of ad groups selling similar products and populated each of them with two versions of the same ad, one with keyword insertion in the headline and one without. A month later, we bundled the data for each type of ad and compared them against each other for different time periods.

The results we saw were quite interesting:

Time Period	Type	CTR	Improvement	Conversion Rate	Improvement
30 Days	Keyword Insertion	1.02%	12.98%	2.35%
	Regular	0.91%		2.79%	18.72%
2 Weeks	Keyword Insertion	1.03%	14.66%	2.43%
	Regular	0.90%		3.03%	24.27%
7 Day Period 1	Keyword Insertion	1.02%	9.37%	2.31%
	Regular	0.93%		2.83%	22.35%
7 Day Period 2	Keyword Insertion	1.04%	20.29%	2.56%
	Regular	0.86%		3.23%	26.00%

As you can see from the chart, the keyword insertion ads typically outperformed the regular ads on click through rate by about 13% over the 30 day period. On the other hand, the regular ads dominated the keyword insertion ads on conversion rate to the tune of about 19% over that same stretch.

Overall, this means that the regular ads had fewer clicks, but the clicks they did get were of higher quality, leading to a much lower cost per conversion and a better return on investment. The keyword insertion ads were able to bring in more traffic, but it was typically of a lower quality. This was probably due to the keyword insertion ads pulling in search queries that were not relevant to our site, and thus bringing in searchers for whom we had nothing to offer.

Now I’m not suggesting that you pull down all your keyword insertion headlines immediately, as every campaign and business will see different results and have different needs. For this particular client, we are able to bid on keywords that are somewhat broader than what we might use in an average campaign. For this reason, it’s important that we control our ad messaging to prequalify our clicks, and with keyword insertion we evidently lost some of that control.

I would encourage you to run a similar test to see how keyword insertion might affect your campaigns. Be sure to let it run for a long enough period of time to establish statistical significance, and once you have the results, let us know what you found in the comments!

Written by Kevin Hill (kevin.hill (at)channeladvisor.com)

Building a Better Brand Campaign

Brand campaigns are easy, right? Just throw some variations on your business name and url into an ad group, set some ads, and let the engines take care of the rest. But then again, you’ve spent a lot of time building your brand; why not spend a little more time on how you advertise it? I’ve seen a number of brand campaigns benefit greatly from some simple reorganization, and with a little work, you too can make sure you are maximizing your brand’s exposure. To start, I would recommend that every brand campaign has, at a minimum, three ad groups:

Brand General: This is where you put all the variations on your business’s name- Acme, Acme Inc, Acme Incorporated, etc. Make sure you have the terms launched on all three match types, and that your bidding is appropriate. Don’t be afraid to bid high since your superior click through rate and quality score will keep your actual costs per click low.

In many ways, these are your most important terms since they’ll drive the most traffic and conversions. They’re also the most likely to be targeted by your competitors or affiliates. Having them separate will allow you to closely monitor their performance and ensure that no one is using your hard earned brand recognition for their own benefit.  

Brand URL: You’re going to want to cover all the variations on your website’s URL here. Remember that people are going to mess up the easy parts sometimes, so make sure to include variations with and without the “www.”, “.com”, and any punctuation like periods or hyphens. On the same note, if you’re a two word business (Acme Widgets) with a one word domain (acmewidgets.com), make sure to account for how people might mistake that by adding spaces or hyphens (acme-widgets.com). Tools like ChannelAdvisor’s built in broad match analyzer and keyword generator can help you pinpoint the different ways that customers type your URL, and they’re also great for coming up with common spelling errors, which leads us to our next group…

Brand Misspellings:  Your customers are going to misspell your name from time to time, so you need this ad group to catch their mistakes and point them in the right direction. Misspellings typically have lower quality scores then the correct versions, so isolating them in their own ad groups keeps them from dragging down the ad group quality scores for your top performers. It also allows you to create separate ads for the misspellings, which is particularly important if you use keyword insertion in your other ads. No need to reinforce any spelling mistakes by pulling them into your ads!

Now those three are a good starting point, but I’m sure every business can think of at least a few more. If you’re known for particular products, you’ll want to add groups for those. “Acme widgets” and “Acme gadgets,” for example, should be in separate groups than “Acme Inc.” Do you have a popular catalog or mailing list? How about a well known slogan? You’ll want those in their own groups with their own specific ad copy, too.

In our own experience, we have seen clients’ Brand impressions increase by as much as 50% from these simple changes. This means that they’re protecting their Brand and minimizing the number of times they snatch defeat from the jaws of victory by losing a prospect to a competitor or a bad review in the SERPs.  Spend a little time on your brand campaign, and you’ll do the same!

Written by Kevin Hill (kevin.hill at channeladvisor.com)

Google’s Trademark Policy

I’ve noticed a lot of confusion over Google’s new trademark policy.   To refresh everyone, Google changed their trademark policy in May to allow advertisers to have trademarks in their ads even if they are not the trademark owner. http://www.searchmarketing.com/searchmarketing/2009/05/google-trademark-policy-update.html

There is a bit of confusion on how Google is handling the approval process and some new ad status messaging. Google’s approval process for ads to run on the trademark is done separately. Google first lets the ad get approved to run for all other policies, and then they check the use of the trademark and how the ad aligns with their new policy.  The process might take a bit longer and you might see the new message “approved-limited.”  This does not mean that the ad won’t run in certain instances, it merely indicates that the ad contains a trademark term, and that the advertiser wasn’t given explicit permission from the trademark owner. Google will check any ads with the message “approved-limited” continually to make sure it aligns with their new policy. They will do the same for all keyword level URLs as well.

You can check yourself if a landing page doesn’t pass Google’s trademark flag by checking on the approval status of an ad from within the updated UI.  If the ad is approved but the keyword is getting zero impressions you might have a trademark problem. 

Written by Erin Gordon (erin.gordon@channeladvisor.com)

Yahoo to Spend Over $100m on Ad Campaign

In an effort to help promote it's Brand (and drive more users and longer time on site), Yahoo is launching a new campaign to begin "realigning all aspects of it's business around simplifying and enhancing the Web experience," according to their official Press Release. 

This campaign includes a full scale Advertising assault over the coming 15 months where they are planning on spending upwards of $100 million combined with a slew of Product Enhancements they have recently made to their portal.

Here are the Product Enhancements they highlight in the PR:

• Yahoo!’s homepage allows people to access their favorite content and sites on any screen from a single Web location.
• Yahoo! Mail now offers simpler photo sharing, editing and easy access to helpful and productive apps.
• Yahoo! Search has been updated today to make Web search results more relevant and meaningful.
• High-quality video calling has been added to Yahoo! Messenger for instant connections with friends and family.
• Yahoo!’s new mobile homepage enables people to continue their Internet experience on their mobile browser. Additionally, new mobile apps including the recently launched Yahoo! for mobile, Yahoo! Finance, Yahoo! Fantasy Football, Yahoo! Messenger and Flickr, bring best of Yahoo! experiences to mobile devices.

I wouldn't count on this driving any material traffic increases in your Search campaign, but it looks like they are not ready to relinquish the #2 spot to Bing quite yet!

Written by Andrew Belsky (andrew.belsky at channeladvisor.com)

Come see us at shop.org

Searchmarketing readers - ChannelAdvisor will be out at shop.org with a full team of experts ready to show you any aspects of our ChannelAdvisor Complete system (Search, CSE, Marketplaces, Rich Media, etc.) that you are interested in.  In addition to our booth (#401), we'll have a dedicated demo room where you can have a drink+snack and see a longer demo if interested.  Stop by the booth and say you read about it on searchmarketing.com for a little gift.